Outlaw public employee unions, the root of many of the state’s evils. It would fix the educational system, too.
Category Archives: Economics
The Last Thing That Public Education Needs
…is more money:
The stimulus bill devoted $100 billion to education (about $80 billion of it for K–12). As Reason magazine notes, that’s twice the Department of Education’s annual budget. “Race to the Top” is less than 5 percent of this staggering gusher of money. It’s not “Race to the Top” that is the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, but spending that the teachers’ unions would only have dreamed of two short years ago.
These funds have kept school systems from having to undertake wrenching changes, or any changes at all. They have helped goose federal spending on education from $37.5 billion in the last year of the Bush administration to $88.8 billion in the second year of the Obama administration, according to the calculations of Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas.
While the private economy has shed 8 million jobs in a work force of 150 million during the downturn, the $550 billon education system has added jobs. It’s the great wonder of the American economy, growing during recessions and regardless of its quality. If everyone in America were a teacher, we’d truly be a worker’s paradise.
The spending would be justified if it correlated with outcomes.
But it never does. It was just a huge payoff to a huge Democrat political contributor, with money that we don’t have, but we’ll have to pay for eventually.
[Update a few minutes later]
Uniting political adversaries — against the unions. Public employee unions should be outlawed. They’ve destroyed California.
But Don’t Call Them Fascists
What were they thinking? It’s amazing to see them so willing to show their true totalitarian nature so blatantly. And it’s too late to pull it, despite the attempts. That’s the magic of the Internet.
[Update a few minutes later]
A comment that Iowahawk left at the Youtube page (and reposted on his FB page):
In order for your “No Pressure” advert to have been made, I am assuming several writers pitched a professionally-prepared storyboard to a committee, detailing shot-by-shot each second of …the film. The committee approved it, along with a minimum $250,000 budget to hire actors, director, & crew. Each scene probably took 3-10 takes, and weeks of post production by special effects wizards.
At no time did a single person involved in this clusterf**k say, “hey, maybe it isn’t the best PR to air our fantasies about detonating the people who don’t agree with us into a mist of blood meat and bone fragments.”
This has got to be the biggest FAIL in the entire history of the internet. Anyone remotely associated with the production of this film should forever be banished from any public institution in the English speaking world, and immediately referred for psychiatric evaluation.
I know what my evaluation would be.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from a James Delingpole:
With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.
Again, what were they thinking?
They were thinking something like the things these people (who were finally brought to justice) were thinking. Because they’re all children of the first totalitarian, Rousseau. It’s what the left does.
[Update a few minutes later]
Spring time for Al Gore — the eco-Anschluss.
Ireland’s Woes
It’s hard to see how the Euro survives all of this, at least in anything resembling its current form.
Conservatives In Name Only
I have a piece up at PJM this morning about space pork.
Why Margaret Thatcher Mattered
An interesting interview with Claire Berlinski (the second of five running this week).
Reductio Ad Somalia
Thoughts from Megan McArdle, on philosophical straw men.
Listen To The Economists
Extend the current tax rates. Actually, they should go further and eliminate the corporate income tax and reduce capital gains rates (plus index them to inflation).
I noticed that on Fox News Sunday yesterday, John Boehner repeatedly said tax rates, not tax cuts. I wish that more people would do this.
The Failure
This was utterly predictable, and in fact, smart people predicted it. Of course, to be fair, it was Pelosi and Reid’s “stimulus,” as well. But at least it looks like it did stimulate the electorate to replace them with someone competent, though we’re stuck with Obama for another two years.
The Tax Issue
Broadly speaking, the Right believes that your stuff is yours. The Left believes your stuff doesn’t really become your stuff until the government says it is. So the Right sees taxes as a way to pay for necessary government services. The Left sees taxes as an instrument of social control and redistributive justice.
Because it’s what Marxists do. And Barack Obama is a perfect example, when in the debates he said that he’d raise capital gains tax rates, even if it resulted in reduced revenue, out of “fairness.”