It's Your Kids' Future, Stupid

I stumbled on an article the other day about the upcoming primary election here in Knox county and how some people are tying their voting decisions on the Mount Vernon City School Levy Renewal to their views on the Freshwater controversy. The article pointed to examples in KnoxPages.com, a local forum site, of people stating that they would vote against the Renewal because of all the money the school board wasted on the Freshwater Hearing.  Of course, in the real world, the MVSB was legally required to give Freshwater a hearing, and it was Freshwater and his legal team that turned it into a 2-plus year, half million dollar fiasco.

That news didn't surprise me, particularly, but some of the other reasons given for voting "no" did surprise and frustrate me.  For example, the teabagger mentality was expressed, where they viewed all taxes as a uniformly bad and wasteful use of citizens' money from which no one benefits but bureaucrats.  Other writers insisted that funding should be withheld until the school system demonstrates more fiscal responsibility (how this can be demonstrated without money isn't explained.)  Others think this is an additional tax rather than a continuation, or think this is a "bail-out", but many just think voting this down will not have any negative effect on them or their children.

I have a niece who is a primary school teacher in Reynoldsburg, OH.  She was recently talking about the effects of Reynoldsburg residents voting down school funding several times in a row.  As might be expected, there have been teacher layoffs, elimination of courses, parents having to pay for student participation in sports and other extracurricular activities, and a general deterioration of the quality of education.  But the problems haven't stopped at the school doors.

Anyone with the financial wherewithal to move to a better school district is doing so as fast as possible.  As a result, the per capita income is dropping, the city is losing money and cutting services, neighborhoods are deteriorating as lower income people, who can't afford home maintenance move in, and the crime rate has gone up.  In short, everything that the forum participants insist won't happen in Mount Vernon are already happening just down the road.

In the big picture, the American student is becoming more ignorant and less competitive compared to the students of other nations. Kids from crummy neighborhoods are less likely to do well in school, especially if its a crummy school.  If we can no longer produce college graduates with advanced degrees to keep us on top, other countries will be more than happy to fill that niche.  The best paying jobs will go to immigrants with better skills and more of the jobs will go overseas.  So let me paraphrase a line I read a few times in the forum;  If you couldn't afford to pay the taxes that keep the schools open and support the community, maybe you shouldn't have had any kids.

Boston or Madhatter's Tea Party

I happened to catch part of an interview with an historian who was talking about what led to the Americans' Declaration of Independence, when the interviewer asked him about the Boston Tea Party. The historian described what occurred to motivate the colonists to destroy the shipload of tea and, although I had heard it all before I hadn't made the connection, that the Republican Tea Parties have gotten it all wrong. If you haven't heard about the GOP tea parties (lucky you), they were designed to be rallies against the tax increases under the current administration and trying to harken back to our founding fathers' protests against unfair taxation.

I always thought that these obviously contrived parties masquerading as a grass roots movement were pretty silly since 90% of taxpayers were receiving tax cuts at the time and the only tax increases were actually roll-backs of G. W. Bush's tax cuts for the richest 10% of taxpayers. I sort of imagined corporate boards of directors wearing slogan adorned T-shirts over their power suits while waving tea bags in the air.

What I realized after listening to the historian is, the Republicans who came up with the tea party idea got it all wrong. The Boston Tea Party wasn't about taxes. What happened was that the East India Company had a huge surplus of tea warehoused in England that was killing the old quarterly earnings. The British government had a cunning plan. They loaded the tea on ships and sent them to the American colonies where they would sell all the tea cheaply. The surplus turns to ready cash, the colonists save lots of money on discount tea and everyone goes away happy, right? Wrong; a lot of colonists were involved in smuggling tea into America and selling it. They saw the situation as a big company coming in, selling tea at artificially low prices to put all the colonial entrepreneurs out of business. Therefore, the Boston Tea Party was a protest against business monopolies by big companies and not about taxes.

So, as I said, the GOP got it all wrong because they thought they were protesting taxes like the patriots at the birth of our republic. Actually many of the wealthiest 10% represent businesses that are much more like the East India Company in the way they eliminate their competitors and try to monopolize the market than they are like their forefathers struggling to stay in business, so the modern tea party attendees not only are protesting the wrong thing, they are more likely to represent the side whose tea got thrown over the side.