Won’t Someone Think Of The Children?!
By Wes Keene | March 14, 2010 | In Category: Economy, General
It’s no secret. Many States are having serious budget issues. After decades of wasteful spending and increasingly punitive tax policy, the facade is starting to crack. In many cases the State cannot borrow any more money and decisions have to be made about what to cut. The only problem is liberals don’t know how to cut (unless its from the military, they seem to have that down pat). They can’t think of a single liberal ally they are willing to say “no” to. That leaves only one option: raise taxes…again.
To justify tax hikes in a time period where there has been virtually no inflation, lawmakers are trotting out tired fear tactics. They claim if we don’t hike taxes, we’ll have to cut schools. So what if we do have to cut schools? Teachers’ unions have negotiated for themselves pay hike after pay hike, while test grades have stagnated.
It seems like massive cuts to education would just be the harsh economic realities of bad job performance coming home to roost. Unions collude to make sure we can’t fire bad teachers and that they all get generous pay raises. The downside is that since we can’t fire the under-performing teachers, we’ll have to fire lots of undeserving educators along with the derelicts. That’s the downside of being a union shop, and taxpayers shouldn’t feel guilty about the cuts.
Obama’s plans for No Child Left Behind involve removing many of the measurable goals schools need to achieve. That’s typical since liberals prefer intangible education goals like “learning climate”. That effectively makes sure schools will never be held accountable for poor performance, at least not with to Federal funding. That’s a shame because there’s a lot of poor performance in the schools and all tax payers are helping to fund it. Once again, liberal ideology defies common sense the rest of us live by.
Instead of discussing how social spending could be cut or how tough negotiations could happen between unions and the State, we’re told to accept inevitable tax hikes required to keep the kids in school. After all, isn’t America’s future important enough that we can buck up a few extra dollars? Or try this one on for size: “We can’t make our State’s dedicated teachers and future generations of children pay the price for our inaction”. It gets old.
When politicians had the chance to negotiate pensions that were responsible they failed. When they had a chance to say no to raise after raise, they failed. When they knew about all the waste in State budgets and did nothing for fear of losing a vote or two from special interests, they failed. Now career politicians would like to turn on the very people who put them in office and blame them for schools failing if they don’t accept one more tax hike.
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