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Microsoft Pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding State Taxes
theodp writes: After stressing how important the funding of Washington State education — particularly CS Ed — is to Microsoft, company general counsel Brad Smith encountered one of those awkward interview moments (audio at 28:25). GeekWire Radio: "So, would you ever consider ending that practice [ducking WA taxes by routing software licensing royalties through Nevada-based Microsoft Licensing, GP] in Nevada [to help improve WA education]?" Smith: "I think there are better ways for us to address the state's needs than that kind of step." Back in 2010, Smith, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft Corporation joined forces to defeat Proposition I-1098, apparently deciding there were better ways to address the state's needs than a progressive income tax.
“In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”
Naomi Klein
I went to public high school. I took advantage of what was offered and took calculus, AP credits galore, and more Latin than I learned in college. Sure, ninety percent of the students wasted their lives and learned nothing, but that wasn't the school's fault. The school sure as hell offered to teach those of us who had the personal responsibility and character not to fuck up for four years.
The problem isn't the schools but the population and the parents. Schools can't fix that. Schools can teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they can't teach sense, and they can't make the proverbial horse drink.
Same here. I am happy to pay my taxes, especially if it keeps the schools funded and keeps old folks out of the gutter. I am sick and tired of way too much of my taxes going to the military industrial complex while the rich multinational oil company's whose interests are served by such mis-adventures sit back and dodge their civic duty to pay their fare share like me.
Please increase my tax rate and properly fund our schools. I am tired of all the badly educated dumbasses, and it horrifies me to see kids only 10 years behind me have to rack up much more debt than I did to go to even a low end college.
You mean the canals that today sit unused?
He means canals like the Erie Canal that turned New York City into the largest port in the U.S., by opening the western U.S. to international commerce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You must have grown up a long time ago, in a school district far away. Today teachers have to buy their own supplies, out of their own personal funds.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Teachers spending $500 out of own pockets for kids' school supplies: union poll
Pens, paper — the basics — are what hard-pressed teachers are laying out their own cash for, says the union. City educrats, with a $24 billion education budget, say, 'hard-working teachers should not have to pay for supplies.'
BY Ben Chapman
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, March 2, 2014, 6:54 PM
City schools are so strapped that teachers are buying the basics with their own money, a teachers union poll released Monday shows.
On average, public school teachers will spend almost $500 of their own cash this year on pens, paper and other instructional materials.
Even with its $24 billion education budget, the city doesn't always deliver the basics, teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said.
"It was the teachers who were holding the schools together -- with the tape that they bought, it seems," Mulgrew said.
Roughly half of 800 randomly selected teachers who responded to the 2013 survey said that their schools do not have a curriculum for the state's tougher new Common Core standards.
Teachers also said the Internet connections in half of their schools were either too slow or too unreliable to support instruction.
City educrats said they were working to get teachers a cash infusion.
"Hard-working teachers should not have to pay for supplies out of their own pockets," said Department spokesman Marcus Liem.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story...
Teachers Spend Own Money for Supplies
Aug. 31
By Maria F. Durand
Bruce Hogue is always looking for ways to make teaching science more interesting.
But the money he uses for the boxes of Cheerios, Bran Flakes and Total needed for one his experiments usually comes out of his pocket.
“As a science teacher, I have an official budget, but that is usually gone by the beginning of the year,” says Hogue, who works in suburban Denver. “When I want to do a science lab, I usually pay for it all on my own.”
Hogue is one of the millions of teachers across the country who are shelling out their own hard-earned cash to pay for books, pens, pencils and other basic supplies that schools have provided in the past.