President Obama has been on the stump trying to cobble together a coalition that will help keep him in the White House. It matters little what damage his actions might do to America, he has bigger plans and needs more “flexibility” to get them done.

On college campuses he is trying to gin up support by making the interest rate on college loans a campaign issue. The issue is government subsidized Stafford loans. He wants to freeze the current interest rates at 3.4% and he wants the Republicans to fight him on this so that he can create another class warfare wedge issue.

Where have we seen something like this before? Wasn’t the government’s heavy involvement in housing, pushing for everyone to be a homeowner that led to the housing bubble? When that bubble burst, all hell broke loose with it and Obama was able to ride the gush of air into the White House.

Think about the growing debt being accumulated by college students and think about their job prospects in the Obama economy. It is not a pretty picture. What happens if those students upon graduating say, “I can’t find a decent job. I have been duped. I’m not paying back my student loans.” What do you do? Jail them?

Now if interest rates climb, the economic effect will be to curtail borrowing, that is, the old price, supply and demand thing. But if interest rates are kept low, then the demand for more debt will not be curtailed. If the demand for more debt is not curtailed the bubble grows. Four more years of Obama managing the economy will not be a boon to jobs. If we haven’t figured that out yet, we better start studying quickly. There’s a big test coming in November.

I fully appreciate the college financing issue. But the education model is broken. Colleges seem to raise tuition in lock step with increases in government aid, so no progress is made. Colleges also seem to be afraid of not attracting enough students so they fill their course catalogs with nonsense courses that will interest no employer. The amount of debt piling up is frightening, but hey, we have a president to reelect. We’ll fix that later; just like Social Security, Medicare, budget deficits…

The Republicans are right to at least demand cuts in spending elsewhere to pay for this. They know the problem won’t get fixed or even addressed with Obama at the helm. We have to hang on for another six or seven months to cancel Obama’s contract and then prepare to roll up our sleeves and undo the damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It the last few days we have heard President Obama ranting about the Supreme Court. This is not anything new. You may also recall his unprecedented calling out of the Supreme Court as the justices sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech attacking them over the Citizens United v FEC case.

The Great Reconciler has also done this in other venues. After Paul Ryan released his budget last year, President Obama invited him to a speech on the budget and with Ryan sitting there devoted his speech attacking the Ryan plan. Very classy. Is this what we hoped and changed for?

Obama and the Constitution

What is most disturbing to me is what Obama is saying about the Supreme Court’s role with regard to the Constitution. What he is saying is approaching downright ignorance and yet he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. What did he teach his students? Where are these students today? Are they some sort of Manchurian Candidates to be unleashed with their own new-found ignorance upon us as lawyers and judges? Are we watching a bad science fiction movie?

‘I am confident,” announced the president of the United States, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” – President Barack Obama, earlier this week.

Unprecedented? What exactly is unprecedented? What is extraordinary? Striking down a law? That capability of the Supreme Court was established by the Marbury v Madison  case in 1803. One hundred fifty-eight acts of Congress have been overturned by the Supreme Court since Marbury. Sounds like a lot of precedent to me.

A strong majority? ObamaCare was passed by a margin of 219 to 212. What would a weak majority be? Actually, since we often hear our liberal friends cry out for bipartisanship, let me point out that there was bipartisan opposition to ObamaCare. Every Republican and thirty-four Democrats voted against it. Only Democrats voted for it.

Passed by a democratically elected Congress? Is there another kind of Congress than a democratically elected one? Also, in order for a review by the Supreme Court, a law by definition has to be passed by Congress. Otherwise it is just a bill and has no effect on anyone. Doesn’t constitutional law professor Barack Obama know any of this? Isn’t he embarrassed to be saying such things? It is clear that most American citizens, sixty-seven percent by some polls, think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Do they understand the Constitution better than a man who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it?

I think an effort should be made to find every student who sat in one of Barack Obama’s constitutional law classes. Give them a test on their comprehension of the Constitution. If they fail, force the University of Chicago to refund their tuition for that course and send them to take Hillsdale College’s Constitution 101. It’s a free ten week course and perhaps the students can help out by donating their refunded tuition money to Hillsdale.

We should all be very concerned that this kind of thinking is being taught in our law schools and will one day come back to destroy the Constitution. Some on the left are trying to call any invalidating of ObamaCare as judicial activism on the right. Adhering to the founding principles and the original intent behind the Constitution is not activism, it is the sworn duty of the justices. If you want to know what activism sounds like, go no further than the words of Associate Justice and former chief counsel of the ACLU Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court should do a “salvage job,” not undertake a “wrecking operation.”

It is judicial activism for the court to try to salvage Congress’ work. It violates the separation of powers. It is the job of the judiciary to interpret the law not make the law. If they interpret the law to be unconstitutional it is not their job to fix it. That’s Congress’ responsibility, but Ginsburg knows full well that the Congress that passed this monstrosity isn’t there any more and will not be there again any time soon. There is a new Congress that was swept in, to a large extent based on the outrage over ObamaCare. Ginsburg is afraid that if the Supreme Court doesn’t salvage it, sending it back to Congress would put the final nail in the coffin. RIP.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Groundbreaking? Earth shattering? Paradigm shift? What is the right word or phrase to describe what just happened in Colorado where a local school district implemented a school voucher program where any student can go to any school and the money will follow them.

This was not done by the state legislature. It was not done by Washington bureaucrats. It is instead a free market solution to a nagging problem of not enough competition to keep schools on top of their game and work hard to attract students (and funding) rather than sitting back, raising taxes, protecting incompetent teachers, and not rewarding good ones. Despite all the union blather about being for the children, this is a masterstroke that will actually empower parents and their children to get the best education available where they live.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7QRV4sSHdc

I hope this spreads like wildfire and we can then get serious about shutting one of President Carter’s legacies, the Department of Education which has accomplished little with the over one trillion dollars they have spent since the deparment was created. Expect a massive counter attack from the teachers’ unions because if this takes hold schools will not be able to afford putting a sub-par teacher in your child’s classroom. It will also enable teachers to negotiate individual employment agreements based on what they bring to the job and let them truly be treated as professionals, not assembly line workers.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Score one for Mr. Boehner. He has been getting lambasted by conservatives for being had on the 2011 budget deal he negotiated. But if you dig a little deeper you can find a nugget of gold.

As part of the budget deal Boehner got the Democrats and President Obama to sign off on not only keeping but expanding the school voucher program in the District of Columbia. Why is that a big deal? Well, two reasons. Between 1990 and 2010 the two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have donated over $50 million to Democrats while giving $2.2 million to Republicans. Republicans overwhelmingly support school choice vouchers while Democrats oppose them. The second reason is that currently about one million kids drop out of school every year and 70% of eighth graders cannot read proficiently. A recent study shows that,

that voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%. That’s significantly higher than the D.C. public school average (56%) and the graduation rate for students who applied for a D.C. voucher but didn’t win the lottery (70%).

It shows that vouchers work. It also shows that it even helps those who are motivated to learn in their traditional schools, it’s not just cherry picking those students who are better than average regardless. The teachers’ unions for all their talk about “being for the children,” are really about the money. Dues money. The teachers’ union doesn’t care any more for the students than the steelworkers’ unions care about the steel. The difference is that the steelworkers are honest about it.

So do we have to wait for another study to prove that vouchers work or can we start graduating students that can do the kind of jobs American companies need to fill without going overseas for talent? Can we now shut down the Department of Education as the dismal failure it is after spending $1 trillion of taxpayer dollars to have one million dropouts a year? Let the free market do what free markets do best. Through competition a better solution is developed. Through government monopoly we have atrophy and failure.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

(This is the second of a series of articles focusing on topics presented at the Cato Policy Perspectives 2011 conference held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on Friday, April 8, 2011)

Kicking off the conference, Ed Crane, president of the Cato Institute, talked about American exceptionalism and how President Obama doesn’t believe in that. To illustrate, he gave the example where while in Europe the president was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, and he hedged by saying he supposed so, just at the Germans believe in German exceptionalism, the British believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. President Obama doesn’t think that America is exceptional and to the extent that he might, he is doing everything in his power to root it out.

The other key point that Mr. Crane made concerned people talking about national goals and aspirations. Nations shouldn’t have goals. People should have goals and nations should protect their right to pursue them. Who wants Washington to set some goals and then have individuals reorder their lives to fit into the grand plan? To me that is the essence of the battle between libertarianism and statism. This is also a nice segue into the Cato presentation on education provided by Charles Murray.

Education

One of the key contributors to American exceptionalism is a well educated work force, and we may be losing that edge. However, Mr. Murray found reasons for optimism. Another point of view I wish to consider was in an article in the Wall Street Journal today by Vint Cerf, one of the real forces behind the Internet.

At a time when we see the tragedy of K-12 education played out in the documentary Waiting for Superman and the pitched battle over public sector unions and teacher tenure in Wisconsin, Mr. Murray’s talk titled. “The Coming Good News About Market Forces and Education,” might seem a bit out of place. He didn’t delve too deeply into K-12 education, other than to say there are a lot more options today than there were in the past, among them: home schooling, charter schools, and vouchers. Mr. Murray’s focus was on post secondary education.

First the bad news:

• The BA degree is no longer a classic liberal education. There are precious few institutions (Murray could name four) that actually provide one.
• He called it a saccharin education with almost anything qualifying as a course. Some of my favorites are: The Stupidity Course at Occidental College (one of Obama’s Alma maters); The science of Harry Potter at Frostburg State University; The Simpsons and Philosophy at UC Berkeley; and Tree Climbing at Cornell University
• It used to be you spent four years getting a BA to mature and grow. In the old days you had a more distant relationship with your professor, more like a supervisor at work. He didn’t care how many other courses you had, he gave you an assignment and he expected you to finish it on time, if you didn’t you failed. Which brought to mind a professor I had at Manhattan College who taught math. His famous saying was, “Engineer build bridge, bridge fall down, no partial credit.” Today that’s not the case. If you miss an exam, you take the makeup test. If you don’t like your grade, you whine to the professor.
• There is now a residence staff at most colleges to do the things parents used to do, so that now four years living at school is just a way of prolonging adolescence.
• He called it a con game
  • You need a degree to get an interview
  • A degree will get you a wage premium over those who don’t have one
  • There is no relationship between a degree and what you actually learned
  • An employer sees a degree and knows two things: one, you have some level of intelligence; two, you have some level of perseverance.
  • A Yale graduate is important not because of what they learned at Yale, but the fact that they got into Yale when they were eighteen speaks to some amount of raw material to work with.

Now the good news.

• Universities were built to support a large library, bring together great minds for scholarship, and enable a large number of students to listen to lectures. Things have changed
• We no longer need a physical library — with the Internet and resources such as Google books you can access a tremendous amount of research material from home.
• Scholarship is now done through collaboration across the world, not across a campus.
• Distance learning works. Why listen to some adjunct give a lecture when you can sit in one room while a Nobel laureate a thousand miles away conducts the lecture?

With the expense of college seeming to be without end the status quo cannot continue. Employers know they are not being served. But there is an enthusiastic group of suppliers ready to provide solutions.

The real course work to learn a skill in college could probably be completed in one and a half to two year, Murray estimates. If a set of certifications could be developed, and Murray cites the CPA exam as an example, that would demonstrate to employers that the applicant before him has actually acquired a set of skills, what more would they need? If similar certifications for marketing, teaching, social work, etc. could be developed a new form of post secondary education might be born. Then the goal of a good education could be about learning how to find what you love and how to pursue it.

Innovation

Vint Cerf has a slightly different take;

Despite our well-developed college and post-college system, America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K-12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.

Perhaps there is a solution in the melding of the two. Our K-12 system produces 1 million dropouts a year and 70% of eighth graders cannot read proficiently. It is broken. We need to put students ahead of job security for teachers and allow talented teachers to receive the economic rewards worthy of their talent. Unions are for just the opposite, protect the inadequate teacher and don’t reward the good teacher as they make the “rest of us” look bad.

But we do need more engineers and scientists. How do we encourage that? First we need to get education out of the hands of Washington. Washington will make sure the solution is bland and ineffective. One of the biggest backers of the creation of the Department of Education was the National Education Association the big education union, so that should tell you something. Let the fifty states come up with competing ideas on how to accomplish this.

Perhaps state schools could offer loans to engineering and science students that would cover whatever financial aid didn’t, in other words a free education. The trade off would be that they had to work in that field in that state. If they did 1/10 of the loan would be forgiven in the first year, 1/9 of the remaining principle and interest would be forgiven in the second year, 1/8 in the third year, such that after ten years, the loan would be fully forgiven. Employers would be attracted to locate near the schools to pick up the talent that graduated. The additional revenue generated from high tech businesses in the state, the income tax revenue from highly paid engineers and scientists coupled with the lower cost of dropouts who end up in prison should make this a cost effective program. All of the capabilities that Charles Murray talked about could be used to form a K-12 to post secondary bond to interest younger students to go into the engineering and science disciplines.

Charles Murray thought this would happen over the next ten to fifteen years. It should a priority to set up sooner. If we fail to act, the replacement for the iPhone won’t just be made in China, it will come from a Chinese company.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

I got an opportunity to watch the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” and it confirmed much of  what I have been saying. Teachers are a national treasure. Teachers’ unions are the new empire of evil. Whoa! That’s harsh. Yes, but not nearly as harsh as flushing thousands of uneducated children into the streets to fend for themselves, when we should be educating them for our future.

The reason I chose the word “evil” is the patent dishonesty the teachers’ unions use to advance their agenda. The steelworkers’ union doesn’t talk about looking out for the steel; they say they are looking out for their members. The United Auto Workers union doesn’t talk about looking out for the cars, they say they are looking out for their members. The Teamsters union doesn’t talk about looking out for the trucks they drive; they say they are looking out for their members. But listen to any pitch from the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers and they are always “fighting for the children.” What utter twaddle. If that is true they should all be horsewhipped for the awful job they are doing. Who are they fighting with? The parents? The taxpayers?  It is a bald faced lie. They are fighting for the teachers and the children be damned.

In New York City, where Mayor Mike Bloomberg has shut down 110 poor performing schools, they are trying a new approach, turning around schools. The experiment would consist of replacing the principal and half the teachers at two schools but keeping the schools and their programs running. Here is the union’s position:

Union leaders might be seen by their rank and file as acquiescing to the replacement of teachers, though those teachers would be entitled to their full salaries and jobs elsewhere in the system. But if those schools were closed, they could be replaced with charter schools, which tend not to be unionized.

That’s the basic union formula, keep incompetent teachers at all costs. They do not want to lose one dollar of union dues and the power that flows from those dues.

In the documentary a bold approach was tried by Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC public schools perhaps the worst school system in the country, where she proposed a merit pay system where teachers could earn as much as $150,000 a year in return for giving up tenure. The union would not even allow it to come up for a vote. Hmmm…merit pay, rewarding teachers for doing a good job, which means actually educating the children, but the union says, NO! We won’t even vote on that. Can we queue the violins and roll one of the union’s commercials about “the children” now, please.

In New York City they finally shut down the “rubber rooms” where teachers accused of misconduct waited, sometimes as long as three years, for an administrative hearing on their case for dismissal. At the time of closing there were 550 teachers in the rubber rooms costing the city $30 million per year. The teachers in the rubber room continued to receive full salary and their benefits grew with the seniority they accumulated while in the rubber rooms. Psst…it’s for the children.

Another expert in the documentary estimated if only the bottom 5%-8% of teachers could be culled from the schools, the progress improvement would soon put the United States back near the top of the world in educational performance. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if after three years on the job a teacher is guaranteed their job for life, that no matter how motivated, they lose their edge. When the going gets tough, instead of doubling their efforts, they can just say, “the hell with it,” I will get paid whether anyone learns or not, and next year I’ll get a raise.

The counter argument, if they were honest enough to make it, is that the unions are fighting to keep teachers’ jobs in a period of high unemployment. But how many uneducated of our youth will be and remain unemployed for much of their life because of failure factories? Why are high tech companies with jobs crying out for more visas for foreign workers? Because our own schools can’t graduate enough people to do these jobs. This is a national disgrace. Imagine if these children, our children, could graduate high school and actually be able to read and write, put together a coherent sentence, and do basic math.

The solution is not the federal government throwing money at the problem. The federal government should get out of the way. It is the teachers’ unions that are the problem. I ask this question to teachers and no one can seem to answer it. Why would a competent and skilled teacher want to link themselves to an incompetent teacher and be sold to a school district as a package? Anyone? Beuller?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

K-12 education is in trouble. A recent report on schools in New York City said that of the 60% or so of students who actually graduate, about half need remedial classes before they can perform at the college level. We have a Department of Education that has spent over $1 trillion since it was created by President Jimmy Carter and school performance has declined.

A conference was held in Denver bringing together the Department of Education, school administrators and teachers’ unions to discuss school policy and what to do to improve education. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the assembled, “Collectively, you have the power to stop our nation’s educational demise.” Collectively; that word keeps popping up in the speeches of President Obama and his administration. The reality is that this nation wasn’t built by the collective. It was built by individual initiative and drive, where one great idea was built upon another, not by group think, but by free thinking.

The Obama administration hailed the summit as a fresh start to kick off education overhaul efforts looming in Washington, especially delicate negotiations over how teachers should be paid and evaluated. Participating school districts agreed to send a teacher, an administrator and a school board member to hear presentations from a dozen school districts that have accomplished school overhauls agreed to by all three groups. – Kristen Wyatt, Associated Press

Does anyone see any mention about students or learning in that quote? It focuses on teachers. How to pay them and how to evaluate them; it is about the unions, not the students. The delicate negations about pay (unions favor) and evaluation (unions oppose) has nothing to do with our children learning. The unions can run all the TV and radio ads they want about “the children” but when you hear the tag line about who paid for the ad, it is not about the children.

In other parts of the country, Republican governors are going on the offensive to really fight for the students. They are challenging the principle of teacher tenure and in some cases even the right to collective bargaining for the teachers. This will be a very intense fight, but the governors are up to the challenge.

“It’s practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now,” said Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, lamenting that his state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.

The teachers’ unions are firing back:

“Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Instead they are saying, ‘Let’s make it easy to fire teachers.’ That’s the wrong goal.”

Let me take a shot at that question. Teachers’ unions, for years, have been arguing for smaller class sizes. To create smaller classes you have to break up larger classes. In doing so, you need to hire more teachers (read: dues paying union members). In hiring more teachers you have to go deeper into the labor pool to find them. Net result, the overall quality of the teachers goes down. The second point, is that Mr. Van Roekel never speaks to a teacher’s performance after he gets into the classroom. If that teacher was competent going in, but because of tenure becomes a slacker, there is almost no getting him out.

The argument that the unions often put forth and even their members repeat it is that, in tough times what is going to prevent an administration from firing a teacher that is at the top of the pay scale? If the only thing that is eliminated is tenure, that is a valid argument. What must be done is abolishing teachers’ unions. Because if a highly qualified teacher is not allowed to perform at their full potential because of union rules, they can be priced out of the market. For example, Jaime Escalante, the math teacher portrayed in the movie Stand and Deliver was talented enough that he wanted to teach math to as many as fifty students in a class. The union fought him because they had work rules limiting class size to thirty-five. If a Jaime Escalante can teach as many students as three tenured but ineffective teachers, why would a district fire him over salary? Keep him, pay him 50% more and fire the three incompetent teachers and everyone comes out ahead. Teachers would want to work there because it is challenging, not drudgery. Parents would want to live in that district because their kids get a great education (increasing the value of their homes as well). And the district could save money by hiring fewer teachers but paying them more.

As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” By asking the teachers’ unions to solve the problem they helped create is foolhardy. If you don’t like the cars built by the United Auto Workers, you can buy a car built by a non-union car company. If you don’t like what the unions are doing to your child’s education, what do you do, get another child? It’s time to stand up for our children. We owe them a future. We don’t owe the teachers’ union members a living. And if those teachers are truly professionals, they don’t need a union either.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

Why in the world would a talented teacher want to link his career to an incompetent teacher and be sold to a school district as a package? Are teachers professionals or are they not? If they are, then why do they aspire to the level of an unskilled assembly line worker?

I have no problem paying a teacher whatever the market will bear, if they are a really good teacher. What does that mean? Take for example, Jaime Escalante, the teacher profiled in the film “Stand and Deliver.” Here was a teacher that took ghetto kids and taught them Advanced Placement Calculus and they performed so well on the standardized test that the education establishment concluded they had to be cheating. That alone speaks volumes about the education establishment. Later on, Mr. Escalante wanted to teach a class of fifty students. Union rules said he could teach no more than thirty-five in a class. His fellow teachers, or should I say union members, fought him every step of the way. Instead of encouraging him and trying to learn his methods, they thought he was making them look bad.

The teachers’ union has this kind of response.

“Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association.

When at the same time the unions are constantly pushing for smaller class sizes, that force school districts to go deeper into the labor pools to find the teachers to put those classrooms, how does the school system make sure everyone is competent? It is a red herring. Just like every advertisement you hear on the radio or television where it’s all about the children. But it is really all about the unions and getting more union, dues paying, members on the payroll, who can then campaign for more politicians who will give them fatter contracts.

If teachers are really professionals, they should tell the unions, thanks but no thanks.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

For years Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most thoughtful and erudite public servants we have had, published a document New York and the Federal Fisc that described the flow of dollars from New York and the great imbalance on the return trip.  Steve Israel seems to have taken up that mantle but his votes in the House are baffling.

In an article published in Newsday today titled, “Rep. Israel: Poorer states take NY’s share,” he has this to say,

“Nobody should be paying more than they get,” Israel said. “The unfairness should not be based on where you live. That’s what really drives me crazy. It’s not necessarily the numbers; it is the discrimination against states like New York” that have more high-income earners.”

That statement opens up at least three contradictory positions that Steve Israel has taken and indicates how out of touch the progressives are with the majority of the American people.  Let’s look at the three issues:

1. Redistribution of Wealth – is it a good thing or a bad thing?
2. Why send money to Washington if it is only going to send it back, albeit with a healthy chunk of overhead removed?
3. If New York is discriminated against because it has high income earners – is increasing taxes on high income earners by making permanent the Bush tax cuts a bad thing or a good thing?

Redistribution of Wealth

Steve Israel votes with his party 98.7% of the time.  We all remember what Barack Obama said to Joe the Plumber, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”  He has voted for the very policies he complains about.  Let’s do some quick math.  Steve Israel voted for the $825 billion stimulus bill.  The stimulus, according to Recovery.gov, brought about $249 million into Mr. Israel’s district.  But based on the relative wealth of his district, his district pays about 0.4% of the nation’s individual income tax.  To make the number’s easier, if we assume that the stimulus borrowing will be repaid exclusively through individual income taxes, that means Mr. Israel’s district will have to re-pay $3.3 billion of the stimulus debt.  So he voted to send $3.3 billion to the rest of the country in return for $249 million for his constituents.  So what’s his argument?  His wound appears to be self-inflicted.

Round Trip Ticket for Your Tax Dollars

Mr. Israel has a 100% rating from the National Education Association, the teacher’s union.  Mr. Israel is part of the federal government.  Nowhere in the Constitution is the Congress empowered to do anything about education.  Education has always been a local matter.  We have local school boards who run the schools, and the bulk of our property taxes go toward funding the schools. 

But we also have a Department of Education.  So what do we do?  We tax the same people who pay for schools through property taxes and state taxes and we send that money to Washington.  The Treasury takes a cut to pay for the added resources it needs to manage this revenue.  The Department of Education takes a cut to pay for their overhead, and then the money is sent back to local school districts as federal aid.  Why not abolish the Department of Education and keep 100% of those tax dollars locally to pay for schools rather than eighty cents on the dollar for the privilege of having the geniuses in Washington handle our money and tell us what to do?  On top of that, what guarantee do we get that a further portion of our tax dollars are not going to pay for another state’s education instead of ours?  If we don’t give the money to Washington in the first place, they can’t give it to someone else rather than returning it.  It is lunacy. 

The article then describes this bizarre exchange:

Israel said “the fairest” situation would have each state receiving the same share of federal funding that it pays in federal taxes. He was asked if states should just keep all their revenue instead.

“It’s priorities!” he said. “The federal formulas need to be changed. It’s not as simple as saying it should be 1-1; it’s the formulas that need to be changed.”

It’s the formulas?  Why in the world would you send tax dollars to Washington and then expect to get an equal amount back?  Why send it in the first place?  If Washington kept to the powers enumerated in the Constitution, most of this discussion would be moot.  The Founding Fathers created the federal government to deal with mostly national issues concerning defense and foreign nations. In carrying those out I want the military to decide where to place their forts, arsenals, naval bases and not to make sure that we have the same amount in every Congressional district. 

The Bush Tax Cuts

Steve Israel has a voting record on tax policy:

• He voted against retaining reduced taxes on capital gains and dividends (Dec 2005)
• He voted against making the Bush tax cuts permanent (April 2002)
• He voted for raising taxes on those making over $250,000 (Dec 2010)
• He received an 18% rating from the National Taxpayers Union meaning he’s a big spender (Dec 2003)
• He received an 83% rating from Citizens for Tax Justice, meaning he supports progressive taxation (Dec 2006)

How do you square these positions with the complaint that New Yorkers send more tax revenue to Washington than they get back?  He voted for those very policies.  He wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and then complains that New York sends more to Washington because we have wealthy people living in New York. Exactly where does Mr. Israel think those tax revenues are going? 

Solving the Problem

The problem may actually solve itself.  Because New York also has high state taxes, high property taxes, high city taxes, and high sales taxes, those wealthy folks might move to Texas or some other state.  Then Mr. Israel and his fellow progressives can finally be in the enviable position of begging Washington to send more money to a bankrupt New York than New York sends to Washington in tax revenue.

That’s my opinion. I’d like to know what you think.  Please add your comments below.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” – Ronald Reagan

Our friends on the left scoff at such words as those above, but the longer they are in power and providing “help”, the more they get tied up in knots.  Let me walk you through an example using Congressman Tim Bishop as the key player.

Executive Pay

Tim Bishop voted several times to allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation.  SEC reports available to the public include compensation information about their executives.  The shareholders have the right to vote by selling their shares if they do not like what the company is doing, or they can vote against management’s recommendation on candidates for the board of directors.  Where in the Constitution does it authorize Congress to get involved in the compensation practices of a private company?

After voting to give billions of dollars to companies through TARP, Congressman Bishop was outraged that executives at AIG were supposed to get bonuses.  Did he consider that before giving away billions in taxpayer dollars?  Did he think to make that conditional and have the companies agree to it before handing over the funds?  No.  Instead, he said contracts should be ignored.

“Contractual obligations notwithstanding, we must hold AIG accountable for its excesses.”

The Stimulus

As part of the stimulus package, approximately $105 million went to public schools in Congressman Bishop’s district.  These schools recorded seven new jobs created on www. recovery.gov. When asked about this a spokesman in the Congressman’s office said the language in the stimulus bill also covered jobs saved.

Between 2000 and 2009 the public school student population in New York State fell by 121,000, yet during the same period 15,000 more teachers were hired in the state.  So why do the taxpayers have to bail out teachers to the tune of $105 million dollars?  Isn’t that an excess the teachers should be held accountable for? Why couldn’t they cap their salaries?  Was it because of their contract?  That didn’t seem to matter much to Congressman Bishop when private industry was involved, but when it is taxpayer dollars, he doesn’t seem to care.

Teacher Compensation

Then the story comes out in Newsday, that the recently retired Brookhaven school superintendent received $462,084 in compensation while that school district got $4 million in stimulus money.  The superintendent’s compensation in the Mount Sinai school district was $402,944 while that district received $2.7 million in stimulus money.  As a comparison, the salary of the President of the United States is $400,000.  Where is the Congressman’s outrage?  I called his office to find out, but no one was available for comment.

Public vs. Private

Why is a Congressman so eager to tell private companies what they can or cannot do with regard to compensation?  If a private company gets that wrong, they could ultimately go out of business.  But with a government run monopoly, like the public school system, not a sound of outrage is heard.  Could it be because the teacher’s union came out in force to get Congressman Bishop reelected?  The teachers’ union signs contracts with school districts that are driving property taxes through the roof, and the Congressman slaps an estimated $12,000 in debt on every household in his district to pay for the $825 billion stimulus program that pays off his supporters.

The Teaching Profession

The teaching profession used to be a noble profession of dedicated people. There are still many dedicated teachers.   However, teaching never used to be a high paying job, relatively speaking.  So if a person went into teaching they did so because they loved it and they derived a great deal of personal satisfaction from it.  Some teachers still do.  But over time the unions drove up compensation for teachers and also fought for smaller and smaller class sizes, not because smaller class sizes were proven to be more effective, but because that would create more teaching jobs with dues paying members.  It would also require that school districts, to fill those positions, go deeper and deeper into the candidate pool to fill the jobs.  And the deeper they went the less qualified the candidates were.  So now we have a lot of blasé, high paid, teaching staff that have not improved the education of our children and schools that have driven many dedicated teachers out of the schools and into other professions.

Many, many hardworking middleclass people struggle to be able to afford to pay their property taxes so their public employees can pull down six figure incomes and so that school superintendents can receive compensation that would make many entrepreneurs blush.  The difference is that the entrepreneur has to get up running every day, or he may lose everything he invested in his business.  In our public education establishment we have rubber rooms where people who should have been fired long ago, keep getting their extravagant pay, contractual salary increases, build up their pensions and do absolutely nothing while they wait, sometimes years, for a hearing to see if they should be terminated or not.

Putting Government Back in its Box

The recently concluded election was an expression that government has gone too far.  It is out of control, spending recklessly, passing laws unread, committing our future generations to mountains of debt and then saying, that it is not enough. We need to spend more.  We need to tax more.

We have to start at the top, with the federal government.  With the Constitution as our blueprint, we have to shrink the government down to the powers enumerated therein.  Whatever is left over, belongs to the states or the people, as the Tenth Amendment so clearly says.

At the state level we need to repair our state governments.  New York’s state government is dysfunctional.  Repealing the seventeenth amendment would once again give states a seat at the table, and provide a check against a federal government run amok.  Drive each function and responsibility down as close to the people as possible so that their voices will be heard and have a greater impact.  I have a mayor of my village of 1,300 residents and I have a president of 340 million of my fellow Americans.  With whom do you think I have a better chance of a face to face conversation to discuss a problem?  However, if all functions are elevated to the federal level, everything becomes one way with the government telling me how to live my life and  if I object saying, “I can’t hear you over the din of 340 million people.”

It’s time to end the hypocrisy where the government meddles in private businesses and yet enables government agencies to steal from us with abandon.  My only prayer is that the newly elected representatives in Washington don’t lose their nerve.