Backers of this idiotic scheme have been pushing it for years.
The problem is, the "national popular vote" is anything but uniform. Liars like to claim Al Gore "won" the popular vote, but that is a false claim; he had less than 1% difference, and the average error rate of voting machines across the US is somewhere between 2-3%. If you go by the actual vote and work with the number of counties where there were voting irregularities and counting irregularities, there's a major question of how many votes anyone had.
In other words: voting equipment is not perfect. This is why we have recounts.
Now, can you imagine the scale of someone having to do a national recount based on the fact that Gore's supposed "win of the popular vote" in 2000 was under the threshold to trip an automatic recount in every single state that has such a law?
We apportion the votes by state for two reasons: #1 - The US is supposed to be a union of self-sovereign states. The Federal government is supposed to have only a limited set of powers, with each state independently deciding the rest of the issues for itself. Yes, this has been eroded badly away in recent decades, but it's still true.
#2 - The logistics of holding a "national recount" are simply not possible. Recounting a state alone is bad enough (look at the Dem vote fraud efforts for Franken and the "targeted recounting" of counties, which magically has more votes than voters in several Dem-heavy districts trying to steal the Senate election).
This was an incredibly insightful comment and deserves better. Just more of the left-wing nutshits on Slashdot that get mod points too often and abuse them, I guess...
Pull the kid out: a few thousand extra dollars in school costs each year.
Raise a stink: Probably wind up pulling the kid anyways, BUT in the meantime, subject the kid to untold harassment for being "the smart kid" (harassment was another ongoing problem btw), PLUS all the aggravation and nonsense involved, PLUS any court fees involved, PLUS any court fees defending themselves...
Yeah. If they don't make a stink, the public school won't get fixed. On the other hand, they're protecting their kid the best way they know how, and this is just "one more thing" - they've been fighting this school enough already. She's much happier at the new school, and she's in classes moving at her pace rather than the pace of the slowest idiot.
Likewise. Here, school funding comes from property taxes (which illegals "pay" maybe pennies on, packing into incredibly low-value housing apartment complexes) and a portion of the state lottery proceeds.
Find me the illegal who is paying real estate property taxes.
Indeed. They don't play the lottery either - you have to provide proof of identity (and residency) to collect the winnings.
Father and mother mutually pulled the kid out and reworked their budget to find the money to send her to a private school. They didn't feel they had any choice when the school principal decided to back up the teacher about the kid having an "inappropriate book in class" (seriously now, the works of Jules Verne are inappropriate??????)
What you're saying is, "We shouldn't spend money, we should just solve these problems!" and your view on how to solve these problems seems to be "Solve them!" The fact is, some of these things are going to cost some money.
No, I am saying we should solve problems by responsibly reallocating resources, and by spending money where it actually needs to be spent.
One example: ACORN does not need money. ACORN needs to be outlawed.
Education needs to be completely overhauled. Our views of education need to be changed. The question is, how are we going to do that, and what pieces can be done at the federal level.
Beyond covering basic curriculum, for the K-12 grades, I think the federal government should get the fuck out. Eliminate wasteful bureaucracy and give the states/cities/counties the room they are supposed to have under the constitution to provide real educational solutions and try different things out.
The absolute worst, craptacular thing about the education system over the past 20 years is that nobody tries anything new anymore. No new ideas = no improvements.
Likewise, Internet needs to be treated like real infrastructure, and not like a luxury entertainment service. There's a question as to what role the federal government can have, but it should have a role and it will cost some money.
The government's role should be similar to what its role was with other telecommunications services: to ensure competition between carriers. There should be no place in America where your choice is "local cable company, dialup or nothing", yet that's the choice 90% of America currently has to make.
I'm not saying this bill is perfect or even good. In fact, it's not what I'd like to see. On the other hand, grandstanding now just so you can say "told you so" later isn't really helping.
If the bill is crap, why is saying so "grandstanding"??? You're doing an amazing job of holding cognitive dissonance, and a spectacularly lousy one of convincing me that this bill should ever be passed.
More tax cuts paired with talk of cutting spending, but no actual suggestions to cut spending!" It's basically pointless stonewalling for the purpose of winning some elections the next time around.
Only because you're not listening. There are an immense number of REAL suggestions to cut spending, they're just not anything the left-wingnuts in the media will report on because the media is all for this bill.
If everything else were the same, but WW2 never happened, could the government had geared up government spending, building the same number of guns and planes and tanks, and gotten the same stimulative effect on the economy without having gone to war? Now think about that-- they spend the same amount of money on the same things, so wouldn't that have had a comparable effect on the economy?
Actually, no, it wouldn't. Sad but true, one of the other things WW2 did was temporarily reduce population. If you have the spending without that, you need even more economic growth to compensate. The other problem you have is that you have to convince a gun-shy population that it's "okay" to spend again. From a psychological standpoint, WW2 was a catharsis, a mental "break point" wherein the population saw a massive shift and mentally declared "ok, depression over."
America needs to have some time off from spending. Face it: the "economic growth" of the past 15 years has come at the cost of an incredibly poor judgement shift in which debts were piled up on each other like a house of cards, real investment and savings were next to nonexistent for most of the population, and the idea of "living within your means" went out the window. Once the population readjusts, there is a significant portion of the economy that simply will not be there because people are going to be much more leery of personal deficit spending (and credit will be issued on much more realistic criteria).
Ladies and Gentlemen, my proud rating above is sad proof that the Slashdot mod system is broken - you make a joke and some sad-sack left-wingnut or Applehead with modpoints calls you a "troll."
The same for Brad's post right before, too; Apple hardware is overpriced compared to identical hardware available in any other channel, and Apple's only "advantage" is Mac OS X... but half the people buying a Mac turn around and use Boot Camp + Winxp anyways these days.
Every governor and legislator begging for federal money right now is simply shirking responsiblity by trying to pass it off to the feds.
But of course they are.
It's easier to whine about needing "federal help" rather than present a coherent budget and tell the people "ok, here's the services we agree we need, and we need $X to pay for it, so we need to raise taxes by a bit."
If you're taking "federal money", then you can complain "waah federal taxes are too high", and most of the brain-dead Obama voters will never make the connection that the federal taxes are too high because all the really local things are being paid for with "federal grants", plus the incredibly wasteful federal bureaucracy.
Where money is being wasted (from my personal observations):
#1 - teacher salaries with respect to the number of students we should have. Believe it or not, ESL teachers come at a premium; there are schools in the district that are literally nothing but ESL teachers. There are districts I am aware of that have so many ESL kids that every single class requires an ESL-cert teacher.
The secondary problem is that with a 20% increase in student population (which comes along with a less than 2% "impact" for our supportive tax revenues), we wind up hiring more teachers than we would otherwise need - we could condense at least one class each per grade level (with the same number of students in each class) and spread the salary at each grade to attract better teachers, or put the money to other tasks, or theoretically lower the class size significantly.
Consider 13 grades (K thru 12), with a "nationwide average" salary of $51k/year. Consider at least a $5k bump above that for the ESL teachers. If we needed at least one less teacher per grade, that'd be $728,000 per year. Without the 20% of the student population that doesn't belong here, my particular area would actually be able to eliminate THREE per grade district-wide, plus four more "specialty ESL teachers" that we have in each grade school and one more in each middle school trying to take care of kids who come in literally never having spoken or heard a word of English in their lives. That's a huge chunk of money to be worrying about. I know we probably wouldn't 100% eliminate it (we'd get the kids of legal immigrants and I certainly don't fault them), but legal immigrants don't account for anywhere near the disproportionate impact the illegals have on wasting our funding this way.
#2 - Certain sports programs. Yes, afterschool programs are important, and I fully support them - but realistically speaking, we waste far too much money on football/basketball (which have only a tiny fraction of the student population's involvement) and the rest of the extracurriculars, all of them, wind up begging and pleading for scraps or running endless "fundraisers" that piss off people in the community more than they raise money. This isn't a fair use of taxpayer money, nor is it efficient, nor is it right.
#3 - Wasted infrastructure. We waste money being "pennywise and poundfoolish" on repairs, because we wind up patching things every year (the same repairs every year) rather than do a one-time rebuild that ought to be good for 20+ years, because "well we don't have the budget for that this year..."
#4 - Damage done to school property by students / related security expenditures. We have to clean up graffiti, broken windows, broken furniture and other damage quickly, we have to have metal detectors at the high school and middle school level (and even armed security when it comes to the "alternative school" location for the real fucktards). This is costly.
Now remember, gang activity requires a "critical mass" of members in an area - if you're under that critical mass, it remains very quiet, but once it hits critical mass, (A) they get much bolder, (B) they start marking turf, and (C) the rest of the student population gets scared enough to worry about reporting trouble. At the risk of repeating myself, 50% of our gang problem at the high school level is the result of our 20% illegal-kid population. I can't say with absolute certainty that if we got rid of those kids the remaining student population still wouldn't hit the "critical mass" for gang activity, but I can tell you we have two known, heavily racist, latino-only gangs that account for a current 65% of our incidents (5-year average). Take that for what it's worth on the subject.
Technically, we have the "right" to try to recoup the losses from the parent. That is if we can catch the kid in the act, if we can prove it in court, and quite probably if we ever have a snowbal
I propose that the problem is not that we are trying to educate immigrants - which seems a noble enough calling.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS should not even be in this country, let alone in the public schools.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the voucher system. Wanna go to a school with no ESL classes? Sure. Wanna go to a school with classes taught bilingually? Sure.
I'm a big fan of instituting vouchers, and then verifying whether the kids are legally here before handing the vouchers over and letting the kid through the door.
If they don't belong in the country, they don't belong in the building disrupting classes.
ACORN is a democrat vote-rigging scam and extortion racket.
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac are Democrat-designed institutions, and Obama just "happened" to be their second biggest lobbying contributor since his 2004 election to the Senate (the Democrats also were responsible for blocking the inquest into Fannie/Freddie's accounting fraud repeatedly).
The last 8 years were a clusterfuck of enormous proportions, yes. Bush was a moron when it comes to the border, and a moron when it came to handing out entitlement programs like candy. Republicans spent 2002-2006 spending like they were Democrats. Meanwhile, Bush was handed a recession by Clinton as well, you just conveniently like to "forget" about that little tidbit and the financial crises of 1998-1999 because it doesn't fit your "waah I hate republicans because I'm a partisan wingnut" mentality.
Defund transit agencies so transit-dependent people (of whom a disproportionate percentage are minority) can't get around
- Public transportation should never, period, be a "for-profit" institution. You and I are in agreement here. That being said, the actual number of people hit by this are the elderly, not "minorities."
Retain entrenched discrimination in housing through redlining and other tactics
Entrenched demographic differences in areas are retained far more through cultural bias, self-segregation, and even the famed "yuppie flight" that happens when a lower-income demographic (and accompanying crime problems) is forced into other neighborhoods. See also: Memphis.
Fail to fund special education, a disproportionate amount of which is handled in urban schools
If it is actually needed, by all means, fund it specifically. This is precisely the sort of real response we need (e.g. "$X to hire four more special-ed teachers to handle class of YZ special-ed students") that the Democrats NEVER GIVE US.
Cut state aid to cities, forcing them to raise property taxes and cut after-school and rec programs
Uhm... you're shitting me, right? Texas has it even worse - some dumbshit democrat decided the best way to "handle" school funding was with a program they called "robin hood", which actually stole money from 'richer' districts to give to 'poorer' districts. Within 5 years every single "robin hood" targeted district had hit the cap on their yearly allowed property tax increases and STILL couldn't pay all their bills.
Set up school districts so whites need not have anything to do with anyone else of a different color
Bullshit. Not just bullshit, fucking bullshit.
Show me ONE location where this has been done. No, seriously, give me proof. You will not be able to show it, because you're nothing but a fucking racist liar.
Fund exurban development by raiding the tax base of cities and inner-ring suburbs to fund sewers, roads and other infrastructure in what used to be farmland, when plenty of space stll exists in further-in cities and suburbs
Yes, if you want to have a "concrete jungle" where there isn't a single tree in a 100-square-mile space, by all means.
If you actually want a sustainable environment consisting of residential buildings, public parks and recreational facilities, well, you're going to have to leave some "undeveloped" land behind.
And guess what? Population growth happens.
Give tax cuts rather than invest in our communities
Again, what form of "investment" are you proposing? I'd like to see some specifics. You want to sponsor a city Boy/Girl Scout program? By all means, I'm all for it. That's a wonderful program that raises good citizens and teaches youth leadership. You want to fund the creation of more city parks and outdoor recreation? Youth or Adult sports leagues? By all means - propose what you want, I'll bet you can get it to pass.
Don't tell me "invest in the community" when you are really just proposing "give free handouts to the illegals" though. That is something I will NOT support.
Oh, you're one of those. Sorry I wasted your time.
Oh, you're a racist retard with no respect for the law. That explains a lot in regard to your attitude.
If you accept my premise that it isn't "fair" or "just" that a kid born in "poorville, USA" can't get a comparable education dollar-wise as a kid born in "yuppietown, USA"
Oddly enough, this isn't always the case, and it's as much about ambition as anything else. Obama was, obviously, raised by his "rich" grandparents after his deadbeat polygamist dad and his slut of a mom dumped him on the side of the road, but even with them being "rich", he did get scholarships to go through law school.
Abraham Lincoln (I know we're going back a while here) was self-educated. Sarah Palin, who despite the left-wingnut media portrayal is actually a very sharp individual, went through public colleges. So did Bill Clinton.
You can spend 10X as much on a particular kid, and if the kid lacks ambition, it won't matter. If the kid lacks talent, it won't matter. So no, I don't accept on face value that a kid born in "poorstate" or "richstate" USA is instantly disadvantaged. The crappiest school districts in the nation are right in the fucking middle of "richstate, USA", yet they are consistently the crappiest - why? Because the demographics of students attending them are part of a culture that disdains intelligence and education. Look at Milwaukee PSD, Houston ISD, Los Angeles USD, Chicago PSD.. what do they have in common? They are in the center of nice big metroplexes, tons of tax money, and yet the school districts are utter shit except for one or two "magnet schools" used to serve as a distraction from the problems of the rest of the district.
Your starting premise is flawed, and you still have yet to give me a good reason to think that the federal government, rather than the individual states/counties, should be handling the funding of schools at all.
Most reputable economists think that with monetary policy maxed out (interest rates are effectively zero), the only thing we can do to stop the bleeding is to use fiscal policy, i.e., spend a ton of money and pray.
Yeesh. What a mischaracterization.
Most reputable economists agree that the interest rates should never have been allowed to get where they are. Constantly jacking them down was foolhardy.
"Spend a ton of money and pray" - the economy has the equivalent of a sprained ankle, currently. "Spend a ton of money and pray" is the equivalent of chopping a leg off to make the pain of the sprained ankle go away: it's a fucking moron's decision.
There has to be a recentering in several markets - housing prices have to come down. Lending standards have to recenter based on the Three C's (Capital, Capacity, Consistency/Credit Score) such that new loans aren't as ridiculously risky as the ACORN/Obama-bred crap loans that are far too common in the current housing market. There is no way to get around having pain because of this. Jobs are going to be lost. Businesses are going to fold or go through bankruptcy proceedings. Yes, it sucks. Trying to make it "less painful" is, however, far worse for the economy - the longer housing prices stay far too high, for example, the more mortgages are simply going to fail, and the less new mortgages will be able to be offered at the right price.
And yes, some of the economy is just gone. This has been a big shock. A large number of people have finally come to their senses and realized that pushing an inflated house note, second and third mortgage, car loans, and $50,000 in credit card debt simply is not sustainable. They will have to do what the responsible ones of us have done the rest of the time, and learn to live within their means. This means a lot less impulse buying. This means a sizable chunk of the retail economy is going to go away. So Be It.
It's time to start being fiscally responsible on all fronts. This means yes, the government should fucking balance the budget. Yes, this means that people with less than 600 credit score and zero down payment should be laughed out of the office when trying to get a home or business loan. And yes, this means we should dump "free trade" policies and instead institute "fair trade" - zero tariffs only for countries that match or better our own worker protection and environmental laws. Start giving real incentives to companies that keep jobs in the US, and penalties to companies that ship jobs out. Michael Dell is too fucking cheap to pay for labor in the country that made him rich, and instead likes using Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian slave labor? Fuck him. Slap a tariff on his goods till he comes home. Somebody else hires call center people working 16-hour days 6 days a week at $10/week? Fuck that shit. They can pay the tax and eat it, or hire someplace with fair labor laws.
Go check out the demographics of various schools districts in metropolitan areas. Segregation is the de facto standard now. It's not directly legislated to be so, but laws exist which make it an inevitable outcome.
You mean laws that prevent kids from spending 5+ hours/day on the bus, and the repeal of other laws which wasted those kids' days in the first place?
Demographics are simply not a good method for analyzing this. Ethnographic and immigrant populations tend to self-segregate by neighborhood, and any policy which is based on getting kids to the nearest available school is going to reflect the neighborhood demographics. The alternative involves long-ride busing and a hell of a lot less parental involvement in schools, plus less student involvement in extracurricular activities (of all sorts, not just sports).
Nobody has EVER in this debate suggested making "whites-only", "blacks-only", "asians-only", "latinos-only" schools. You are nothing but a filthy liar claiming otherwise.
In all of my years of political action at the state level, I have never once heard a Democrat advocate to "simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning."
Then you've never opened your ears. We get it all the time here: "we need to raise taxes, we need more money for schools."
When we ask in return "what do you plan to do with the money? What's your proposed budget?" all the Democrats give us back is blank stares and accusations that we "don't care about the children", which is laughable given that I spend my day every day working to give them a better education.
You want kids to have a better education? Here's what you do. You clean out the kids who shouldn't be in a particular school - the illegals go the fuck back to their home countries, the kids who don't meet grade standards go back down to the appropriate grade level, and if they fail again, you send them to the special school. You stratify the classes, so if you have 3 classes at 4th grade, you have the high class, low class, and "in danger of needing remedial attention" class. For the kids in that last class, you hold open parent/teacher conferences every two weeks, with a mandatory meeting twice a semester (middle and end). If a kid misses a homework assignment, the parent gets called in for a conference to discuss what happened. You make damn sure that the parents are involved, and you make sure that the bright kids aren't bored out of their minds waiting for the slow kids to catch on to a concept they already learned three years ago.
You put back in the classes outside of standard "readin', ritin', 'rithmetic" fare - civics, home economics, team sports, individual sports. You make sure that the kids understand basic nutrition, basic government concepts and structure, basic economics (what a checkbook is, what a savings account is, what interest is, how to balance a home budget and live within their means), the importance of exercise both in health and in stress relief. You learn the value of concepts that cross over from class to class - for example, a kid who understands basic math but doesn't see the use will get it when you stick a budget in front of him and he realizes "holy shit, I actually do have a reason to know this stuff." A kid who doesn't understand why it's important to spell correctly and have good handwriting will suddenly have that little light bulb turn on when you tell him "ok, now you're going to write a letter to your congressman on something you feel is important."
You raise, not just little automatons who can pass some arbitrary national test (though if you teach them right the test will NOT be a problem), but good citizens.
Once that's done, if you still think the facilities need improvement, let's talk. If you still think they need some form of advanced technology in the classroom (study after study has shown arbitary use of "technology" is dubious at best, especially in lower grades), we can talk about it and try it out. If y
Be careful: a large part of the "fucking corrupt losers who should be shot" are from the right.
That was rather the point of saying "our entire system" was full of them... the Republicans certainly aren't blameless, they could certainly have been a lot more fiscally responsible (as well as a hell of a lot more responsible stopping these bad loans and pulling Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac into line in the early 2000's) than they were.
Since you are obviously a product of the public edjamacashun factery, allow me to educate you.
"Nothing" is in fact 0.
20%, is in fact 20/100, or 1/5, written as "one fifth."
40%, our actual expenditure on the illegal kids, is in fact 40/100, or Two Fifths.
So, in order to illustrate to you the impact, allow me to offer this analogy: I will take away a full two fifths of your take-home pay, and see if you in fact feel this is "nothing."
Now, this doesn't even start to address the OTHER modes of impact in which the illegal kids injure the education of the children who actually have a right to be in the school - disruption to classes, time wasted, larger class size, safety dangers (again keeping in mind that a mere 20% of the high school class is responsible for 50% of the drug/gang crime problem), and the fact that we're forced to hire "ESL" teachers whose primary qualification is not a thorough understanding and breadth of experience in teaching the subject matter, but rather the ability to somewhat-passably speak the other language in question.
Yes, and they can often be a very quick stimulus, but they aren't necessarily the best stimulus. Lots of people believe (from what I've heard and read) that some kinds of spending can do better (you hear about the "multiplier").
Tax hikes also have a "multiplier", though - most taxes don't just hit the price of goods/services once, they hit them every time an affected economic transaction is made. Take fuel taxes; we buy fuel once (to bring raw materials to production), twice (to bring finished individual parts to the assembly factory), thrice (to get the product to the store), quadrice (for the consumer to bring it home), and possibly quintice or beyond if there's a warehouse stop anywhere along the way.
the question that tends to be a sticking point is "what's 'working' and what's 'unnecessary'?"
THAT is the point that needs to be argued, but instead of individually arguing, Congress/Obama has been lumping all their pork and waste into a big bill, called it "stimulus", and dishonestly screamed "OMG we have to do something now the sky is falling" when people questioned the need for all the garbage in the bill.
Yeah, and what some people seem to miss is that even if they don't technically "jack up" your taxes, the government will be spending money they don't have,
Only if the government fails to cut their spending from the things they don't absolutely need - hey, if I'm $100 below budget, I have to find something to cut. That's how budgeting works.
Our roads and bridges are crumbling,
Which means we should discuss what investment we should make into them, make wise investments that are sustainable rather than simply throwing $billions of band-aid "repairs" down the hole...
our Internet infrastructure is sub-par.
Funny. Internet infrastructure and phone lines are not government services. Implement equal-access laws similar to phone service for internet providers so that we get real marketplace competition, and watch it grow. The real reason our Internet infrastructure is crap is that 90% of America is stuck in de facto monopoly environments being charged far too much while the companies, having no competition (because quite literally no other company is allowed to enter the area), do nothing to expand/improve the infrastructure.
Also, our education system is in the shitter, partially because of an attitude that education is a personal investment or a privilege for the rich (or at least well-off) rather than something that benefits our society at large. (having a poorly educated citizenry in a democracy is a huge problem.)
But you don't fix education by simply throwing money at it - trust me, I work in the education sector. You fix education by making sure that parents are more involved, by stratifying classes to make sure that the bright kids are encouraged, and yes, by occasionally holding back the dimwits a grad or two or even sending them to special schools that can handle their problems.
On top of that, our healthcare system really is in bad shape.
And again... our healthcare system isn't a government system, unless you're specifically speaking of medicare/medicaid. The solution here isn't "government spends money", it's "the people/government smack the HMOs and so-called insurance agencies over the head and stop them from defrauding us."
I heard one of the things Republicans focused on cutting was food stamps-- as though $3 a day is too extravagant a food budget.
Actually, what they were speaking of was making sure food stamps go to those who need them rather than handing them out willy-nilly and to people who don't even have the legal right to be in this country.
Try researching what you are saying before spouting nonsense please.
I wouldn't mind if Republicans were asking for sensible things
I work in the education sector. I've seen the numbers. In the district I'm in, fully 20% of our students have dubious (or simply no) immigration papers. We spend 40% of our budget on ESL classes and ESL-certified teachers just to try to educate those 20% of the kids who shouldn't even be here, and during the time they mix with the normal kids in classes, they disrupt the class flow and require constant re-explanation of even basic concepts.
If that weren't bad enough, on our high school level (and we have 10,000 high-school kids in district), ~50% of drug/gang arrests are due to that 20% of the student population. It varies up and down a little year by year, but 50% is the 5-year average.
You tell me to "not push that button"? This is not a problem we can ignore. The legislation that failed the past two years when Bush, McCain, and others were trying to push Amnesty failed because Amnesty is not a workable policy.
You go be the one to tell an American parent that their kid was shot by an illegal immigrant kid while at school (fortunately the kid lived, he was just hit in the leg after the crossfire between two rival Mexican gang members), THEN tell me we don't need to deal with this problem at its source and properly enforce our borders and our laws.
But don't worry! Now that Obama is elected, he'll come save you... oh, wait, right.
Obama was one of the extortion artists for ACORN who started off the whole "write loans that will never work, then bundle them as "securities" bit... and also just-so-happens to have been the second biggest recipient of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac lobbying money during the time when their financial fraud was being uncovered.:(
So much for help coming from him. The policies currently wandering from his administration are like amputating a leg to get rid of a sprained ankle.
The "You get $X per kid" mentality is part of why school districts pad their numbers and school administrations make it so difficult to get rid of problem kids. You lose a kid, you lose their $. Thus kids who are causing REAL problems, who should be shipped off to special schools or even to juvenile hall, wind up instead hurting the education of the other kids around them. You can't have one of these kids in your class and expect the rest to learn - 90% of the teacher's time (or more) is spent just dealing with that one kid.
My main argument was (at least I hoped), that the federal government can ensure that everybody gets the same funding
When has the federal government ever done a good job of doing this? Ever? One definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, expecting different results. Throwing money to the Federal government is a way to get the money eaten up in bureaucracy, not to get it where it's needed.
I'd argue very strongly that a child born in po-dunk USA with a tiny tax base gets the ability to access the same learning materials and brainpower (i.e. teachers) as somebody living in some rich suburb full of software engineers.
Without some marxist/communist scheme of assigning "you go here, you go here, you go here" to your teachers? I'd be interested in hearing how you expect this to work. Are you following "robin hood" funding reallocation like Texas tried, which wound up making certain counties and cities cap out their property tax rates, cut teachers and institute 40-child classrooms instead of 30 and STILL have to cut their own local police and fire departments trying to pay what they "owed" to some other county's schools?
Regardless, there IS a difference in any area in the cost of educating kids, and in what will be available to them outside of school. If you think there are honestly counties that are "too poor" to give their kids a quality education, then let those counties apply to their home state for funding. Handing out a federal "every school gets $x per student" allocation is PURE BULLSHIT.
But... *gasp* that isn't simply the Democrat way! The Democrat way is to simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning, call it "solved", and then gasp again when the problem comes up next election cycle and they need to "fix" it by throwing more money without any oversight or planning... repeat ad nauseum.
And while we are at it, lets dump Brown vs. Board of Education [brownvboard.org] too while we are at it, eh? After all, if a state wants to start segregating schools you can just move to another state, right?
Dishonest Debate Tactics 101: set up strawman, knock down strawman. Nobody in this debate has ever suggested re-segregating schools.
Now, there HAS been a suggestion which has been sometimes accused of such, which is that of repealing mandatory busing and sending most kids to the school closest to their home. Since ethnotypes and immigrant populations tend to self-segregate in choice of living locations, this would mean that, yes, you'd have a number of schools that wound up looking like they were "segregated." The upside to this, however, is that it makes parental involvement and community involvement more likely. Kids who are bused to school for 3+ hours every day don't participate in extracurriculars as much. They don't have as much time to work on their homework or study. Their parents aren't as involved in the school as when it's right in the neighborhood, either. And as mentioned above, involved parents = better performing kids.
Or if the state wants all their public schools to teach intelligent design, you should either hold your nose or move--under no circumstance should you appeal to those pesky activist judges in the the federal courts, right?
Funny. There are all sorts of things you could have mentioned here - sex education about homosexuality during kindergarten, pro-"one world government" propaganda, moral relativism, revisionist history that tries to paint honest and noble men (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) as evil bastards and evil bastards (Che Guevara) as noble men... What had you on "intelligent design"?
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Backers of this idiotic scheme have been pushing it for years.
The problem is, the "national popular vote" is anything but uniform. Liars like to claim Al Gore "won" the popular vote, but that is a false claim; he had less than 1% difference, and the average error rate of voting machines across the US is somewhere between 2-3%. If you go by the actual vote and work with the number of counties where there were voting irregularities and counting irregularities, there's a major question of how many votes anyone had.
In other words: voting equipment is not perfect. This is why we have recounts.
Now, can you imagine the scale of someone having to do a national recount based on the fact that Gore's supposed "win of the popular vote" in 2000 was under the threshold to trip an automatic recount in every single state that has such a law?
We apportion the votes by state for two reasons:
#1 - The US is supposed to be a union of self-sovereign states. The Federal government is supposed to have only a limited set of powers, with each state independently deciding the rest of the issues for itself. Yes, this has been eroded badly away in recent decades, but it's still true.
#2 - The logistics of holding a "national recount" are simply not possible. Recounting a state alone is bad enough (look at the Dem vote fraud efforts for Franken and the "targeted recounting" of counties, which magically has more votes than voters in several Dem-heavy districts trying to steal the Senate election).
This was an incredibly insightful comment and deserves better. Just more of the left-wing nutshits on Slashdot that get mod points too often and abuse them, I guess...
Do the calculation.
Pull the kid out: a few thousand extra dollars in school costs each year.
Raise a stink: Probably wind up pulling the kid anyways, BUT in the meantime, subject the kid to untold harassment for being "the smart kid" (harassment was another ongoing problem btw), PLUS all the aggravation and nonsense involved, PLUS any court fees involved, PLUS any court fees defending themselves...
Yeah. If they don't make a stink, the public school won't get fixed. On the other hand, they're protecting their kid the best way they know how, and this is just "one more thing" - they've been fighting this school enough already. She's much happier at the new school, and she's in classes moving at her pace rather than the pace of the slowest idiot.
Wow.
I can barely hear you over the sound of all the kool-aid you're drinking.
Likewise. Here, school funding comes from property taxes (which illegals "pay" maybe pennies on, packing into incredibly low-value housing apartment complexes) and a portion of the state lottery proceeds.
Find me the illegal who is paying real estate property taxes.
Indeed. They don't play the lottery either - you have to provide proof of identity (and residency) to collect the winnings.
Father and mother mutually pulled the kid out and reworked their budget to find the money to send her to a private school. They didn't feel they had any choice when the school principal decided to back up the teacher about the kid having an "inappropriate book in class" (seriously now, the works of Jules Verne are inappropriate??????)
I'm not going to even read your whole long post
That's okay. You lack the brainpower to understand it anyways.
What you're saying is, "We shouldn't spend money, we should just solve these problems!" and your view on how to solve these problems seems to be "Solve them!" The fact is, some of these things are going to cost some money.
No, I am saying we should solve problems by responsibly reallocating resources, and by spending money where it actually needs to be spent.
One example: ACORN does not need money. ACORN needs to be outlawed.
Education needs to be completely overhauled. Our views of education need to be changed. The question is, how are we going to do that, and what pieces can be done at the federal level.
Beyond covering basic curriculum, for the K-12 grades, I think the federal government should get the fuck out. Eliminate wasteful bureaucracy and give the states/cities/counties the room they are supposed to have under the constitution to provide real educational solutions and try different things out.
The absolute worst, craptacular thing about the education system over the past 20 years is that nobody tries anything new anymore. No new ideas = no improvements.
Likewise, Internet needs to be treated like real infrastructure, and not like a luxury entertainment service. There's a question as to what role the federal government can have, but it should have a role and it will cost some money.
The government's role should be similar to what its role was with other telecommunications services: to ensure competition between carriers. There should be no place in America where your choice is "local cable company, dialup or nothing", yet that's the choice 90% of America currently has to make.
I'm not saying this bill is perfect or even good. In fact, it's not what I'd like to see. On the other hand, grandstanding now just so you can say "told you so" later isn't really helping.
If the bill is crap, why is saying so "grandstanding"??? You're doing an amazing job of holding cognitive dissonance, and a spectacularly lousy one of convincing me that this bill should ever be passed.
More tax cuts paired with talk of cutting spending, but no actual suggestions to cut spending!" It's basically pointless stonewalling for the purpose of winning some elections the next time around.
Only because you're not listening. There are an immense number of REAL suggestions to cut spending, they're just not anything the left-wingnuts in the media will report on because the media is all for this bill.
If everything else were the same, but WW2 never happened, could the government had geared up government spending, building the same number of guns and planes and tanks, and gotten the same stimulative effect on the economy without having gone to war? Now think about that-- they spend the same amount of money on the same things, so wouldn't that have had a comparable effect on the economy?
Actually, no, it wouldn't. Sad but true, one of the other things WW2 did was temporarily reduce population. If you have the spending without that, you need even more economic growth to compensate. The other problem you have is that you have to convince a gun-shy population that it's "okay" to spend again. From a psychological standpoint, WW2 was a catharsis, a mental "break point" wherein the population saw a massive shift and mentally declared "ok, depression over."
America needs to have some time off from spending. Face it: the "economic growth" of the past 15 years has come at the cost of an incredibly poor judgement shift in which debts were piled up on each other like a house of cards, real investment and savings were next to nonexistent for most of the population, and the idea of "living within your means" went out the window. Once the population readjusts, there is a significant portion of the economy that simply will not be there because people are going to be much more leery of personal deficit spending (and credit will be issued on much more realistic criteria).
And in ad
Ladies and Gentlemen, my proud rating above is sad proof that the Slashdot mod system is broken - you make a joke and some sad-sack left-wingnut or Applehead with modpoints calls you a "troll."
The same for Brad's post right before, too; Apple hardware is overpriced compared to identical hardware available in any other channel, and Apple's only "advantage" is Mac OS X... but half the people buying a Mac turn around and use Boot Camp + Winxp anyways these days.
Hell, these days Apple forces users to spend through the nose in order to run WinXP too ;)
Every governor and legislator begging for federal money right now is simply shirking responsiblity by trying to pass it off to the feds.
But of course they are.
It's easier to whine about needing "federal help" rather than present a coherent budget and tell the people "ok, here's the services we agree we need, and we need $X to pay for it, so we need to raise taxes by a bit."
If you're taking "federal money", then you can complain "waah federal taxes are too high", and most of the brain-dead Obama voters will never make the connection that the federal taxes are too high because all the really local things are being paid for with "federal grants", plus the incredibly wasteful federal bureaucracy.
Where money is being wasted (from my personal observations):
#1 - teacher salaries with respect to the number of students we should have. Believe it or not, ESL teachers come at a premium; there are schools in the district that are literally nothing but ESL teachers. There are districts I am aware of that have so many ESL kids that every single class requires an ESL-cert teacher.
The secondary problem is that with a 20% increase in student population (which comes along with a less than 2% "impact" for our supportive tax revenues), we wind up hiring more teachers than we would otherwise need - we could condense at least one class each per grade level (with the same number of students in each class) and spread the salary at each grade to attract better teachers, or put the money to other tasks, or theoretically lower the class size significantly.
Consider 13 grades (K thru 12), with a "nationwide average" salary of $51k/year. Consider at least a $5k bump above that for the ESL teachers. If we needed at least one less teacher per grade, that'd be $728,000 per year. Without the 20% of the student population that doesn't belong here, my particular area would actually be able to eliminate THREE per grade district-wide, plus four more "specialty ESL teachers" that we have in each grade school and one more in each middle school trying to take care of kids who come in literally never having spoken or heard a word of English in their lives. That's a huge chunk of money to be worrying about. I know we probably wouldn't 100% eliminate it (we'd get the kids of legal immigrants and I certainly don't fault them), but legal immigrants don't account for anywhere near the disproportionate impact the illegals have on wasting our funding this way.
#2 - Certain sports programs. Yes, afterschool programs are important, and I fully support them - but realistically speaking, we waste far too much money on football/basketball (which have only a tiny fraction of the student population's involvement) and the rest of the extracurriculars, all of them, wind up begging and pleading for scraps or running endless "fundraisers" that piss off people in the community more than they raise money. This isn't a fair use of taxpayer money, nor is it efficient, nor is it right.
#3 - Wasted infrastructure. We waste money being "pennywise and poundfoolish" on repairs, because we wind up patching things every year (the same repairs every year) rather than do a one-time rebuild that ought to be good for 20+ years, because "well we don't have the budget for that this year..."
#4 - Damage done to school property by students / related security expenditures. We have to clean up graffiti, broken windows, broken furniture and other damage quickly, we have to have metal detectors at the high school and middle school level (and even armed security when it comes to the "alternative school" location for the real fucktards). This is costly.
Now remember, gang activity requires a "critical mass" of members in an area - if you're under that critical mass, it remains very quiet, but once it hits critical mass, (A) they get much bolder, (B) they start marking turf, and (C) the rest of the student population gets scared enough to worry about reporting trouble. At the risk of repeating myself, 50% of our gang problem at the high school level is the result of our 20% illegal-kid population. I can't say with absolute certainty that if we got rid of those kids the remaining student population still wouldn't hit the "critical mass" for gang activity, but I can tell you we have two known, heavily racist, latino-only gangs that account for a current 65% of our incidents (5-year average). Take that for what it's worth on the subject.
Technically, we have the "right" to try to recoup the losses from the parent. That is if we can catch the kid in the act, if we can prove it in court, and quite probably if we ever have a snowbal
I propose that the problem is not that we are trying to educate immigrants - which seems a noble enough calling.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS should not even be in this country, let alone in the public schools.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the voucher system. Wanna go to a school with no ESL classes? Sure. Wanna go to a school with classes taught bilingually? Sure.
I'm a big fan of instituting vouchers, and then verifying whether the kids are legally here before handing the vouchers over and letting the kid through the door.
If they don't belong in the country, they don't belong in the building disrupting classes.
ACORN is a democrat vote-rigging scam and extortion racket.
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac are Democrat-designed institutions, and Obama just "happened" to be their second biggest lobbying contributor since his 2004 election to the Senate (the Democrats also were responsible for blocking the inquest into Fannie/Freddie's accounting fraud repeatedly).
The last 8 years were a clusterfuck of enormous proportions, yes. Bush was a moron when it comes to the border, and a moron when it came to handing out entitlement programs like candy. Republicans spent 2002-2006 spending like they were Democrats. Meanwhile, Bush was handed a recession by Clinton as well, you just conveniently like to "forget" about that little tidbit and the financial crises of 1998-1999 because it doesn't fit your "waah I hate republicans because I'm a partisan wingnut" mentality.
Defund transit agencies so transit-dependent people (of whom a disproportionate percentage are minority) can't get around
- Public transportation should never, period, be a "for-profit" institution. You and I are in agreement here. That being said, the actual number of people hit by this are the elderly, not "minorities."
Retain entrenched discrimination in housing through redlining and other tactics
Entrenched demographic differences in areas are retained far more through cultural bias, self-segregation, and even the famed "yuppie flight" that happens when a lower-income demographic (and accompanying crime problems) is forced into other neighborhoods. See also: Memphis.
Fail to fund special education, a disproportionate amount of which is handled in urban schools
If it is actually needed, by all means, fund it specifically. This is precisely the sort of real response we need (e.g. "$X to hire four more special-ed teachers to handle class of YZ special-ed students") that the Democrats NEVER GIVE US.
Cut state aid to cities, forcing them to raise property taxes and cut after-school and rec programs
Uhm... you're shitting me, right? Texas has it even worse - some dumbshit democrat decided the best way to "handle" school funding was with a program they called "robin hood", which actually stole money from 'richer' districts to give to 'poorer' districts. Within 5 years every single "robin hood" targeted district had hit the cap on their yearly allowed property tax increases and STILL couldn't pay all their bills.
Set up school districts so whites need not have anything to do with anyone else of a different color
Bullshit. Not just bullshit, fucking bullshit.
Show me ONE location where this has been done. No, seriously, give me proof. You will not be able to show it, because you're nothing but a fucking racist liar.
Fund exurban development by raiding the tax base of cities and inner-ring suburbs to fund sewers, roads and other infrastructure in what used to be farmland, when plenty of space stll exists in further-in cities and suburbs
Yes, if you want to have a "concrete jungle" where there isn't a single tree in a 100-square-mile space, by all means.
If you actually want a sustainable environment consisting of residential buildings, public parks and recreational facilities, well, you're going to have to leave some "undeveloped" land behind.
And guess what? Population growth happens.
Give tax cuts rather than invest in our communities
Again, what form of "investment" are you proposing? I'd like to see some specifics. You want to sponsor a city Boy/Girl Scout program? By all means, I'm all for it. That's a wonderful program that raises good citizens and teaches youth leadership. You want to fund the creation of more city parks and outdoor recreation? Youth or Adult sports leagues? By all means - propose what you want, I'll bet you can get it to pass.
Don't tell me "invest in the community" when you are really just proposing "give free handouts to the illegals" though. That is something I will NOT support.
Oh, you're one of those. Sorry I wasted your time.
Oh, you're a racist retard with no respect for the law. That explains a lot in regard to your attitude.
If you accept my premise that it isn't "fair" or "just" that a kid born in "poorville, USA" can't get a comparable education dollar-wise as a kid born in "yuppietown, USA"
Oddly enough, this isn't always the case, and it's as much about ambition as anything else. Obama was, obviously, raised by his "rich" grandparents after his deadbeat polygamist dad and his slut of a mom dumped him on the side of the road, but even with them being "rich", he did get scholarships to go through law school.
Abraham Lincoln (I know we're going back a while here) was self-educated. Sarah Palin, who despite the left-wingnut media portrayal is actually a very sharp individual, went through public colleges. So did Bill Clinton.
You can spend 10X as much on a particular kid, and if the kid lacks ambition, it won't matter. If the kid lacks talent, it won't matter. So no, I don't accept on face value that a kid born in "poorstate" or "richstate" USA is instantly disadvantaged. The crappiest school districts in the nation are right in the fucking middle of "richstate, USA", yet they are consistently the crappiest - why? Because the demographics of students attending them are part of a culture that disdains intelligence and education. Look at Milwaukee PSD, Houston ISD, Los Angeles USD, Chicago PSD.. what do they have in common? They are in the center of nice big metroplexes, tons of tax money, and yet the school districts are utter shit except for one or two "magnet schools" used to serve as a distraction from the problems of the rest of the district.
Your starting premise is flawed, and you still have yet to give me a good reason to think that the federal government, rather than the individual states/counties, should be handling the funding of schools at all.
Most reputable economists think that with monetary policy maxed out (interest rates are effectively zero), the only thing we can do to stop the bleeding is to use fiscal policy, i.e., spend a ton of money and pray.
Yeesh. What a mischaracterization.
Most reputable economists agree that the interest rates should never have been allowed to get where they are. Constantly jacking them down was foolhardy.
"Spend a ton of money and pray" - the economy has the equivalent of a sprained ankle, currently. "Spend a ton of money and pray" is the equivalent of chopping a leg off to make the pain of the sprained ankle go away: it's a fucking moron's decision.
There has to be a recentering in several markets - housing prices have to come down. Lending standards have to recenter based on the Three C's (Capital, Capacity, Consistency/Credit Score) such that new loans aren't as ridiculously risky as the ACORN/Obama-bred crap loans that are far too common in the current housing market. There is no way to get around having pain because of this. Jobs are going to be lost. Businesses are going to fold or go through bankruptcy proceedings. Yes, it sucks. Trying to make it "less painful" is, however, far worse for the economy - the longer housing prices stay far too high, for example, the more mortgages are simply going to fail, and the less new mortgages will be able to be offered at the right price.
And yes, some of the economy is just gone. This has been a big shock. A large number of people have finally come to their senses and realized that pushing an inflated house note, second and third mortgage, car loans, and $50,000 in credit card debt simply is not sustainable. They will have to do what the responsible ones of us have done the rest of the time, and learn to live within their means. This means a lot less impulse buying. This means a sizable chunk of the retail economy is going to go away. So Be It.
It's time to start being fiscally responsible on all fronts. This means yes, the government should fucking balance the budget. Yes, this means that people with less than 600 credit score and zero down payment should be laughed out of the office when trying to get a home or business loan. And yes, this means we should dump "free trade" policies and instead institute "fair trade" - zero tariffs only for countries that match or better our own worker protection and environmental laws. Start giving real incentives to companies that keep jobs in the US, and penalties to companies that ship jobs out. Michael Dell is too fucking cheap to pay for labor in the country that made him rich, and instead likes using Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian slave labor? Fuck him. Slap a tariff on his goods till he comes home. Somebody else hires call center people working 16-hour days 6 days a week at $10/week? Fuck that shit. They can pay the tax and eat it, or hire someplace with fair labor laws.
Go check out the demographics of various schools districts in metropolitan areas. Segregation is the de facto standard now. It's not directly legislated to be so, but laws exist which make it an inevitable outcome.
You mean laws that prevent kids from spending 5+ hours/day on the bus, and the repeal of other laws which wasted those kids' days in the first place?
Demographics are simply not a good method for analyzing this. Ethnographic and immigrant populations tend to self-segregate by neighborhood, and any policy which is based on getting kids to the nearest available school is going to reflect the neighborhood demographics. The alternative involves long-ride busing and a hell of a lot less parental involvement in schools, plus less student involvement in extracurricular activities (of all sorts, not just sports).
Nobody has EVER in this debate suggested making "whites-only", "blacks-only", "asians-only", "latinos-only" schools. You are nothing but a filthy liar claiming otherwise.
In all of my years of political action at the state level, I have never once heard a Democrat advocate to "simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning."
Then you've never opened your ears. We get it all the time here: "we need to raise taxes, we need more money for schools."
When we ask in return "what do you plan to do with the money? What's your proposed budget?" all the Democrats give us back is blank stares and accusations that we "don't care about the children", which is laughable given that I spend my day every day working to give them a better education.
You want kids to have a better education? Here's what you do. You clean out the kids who shouldn't be in a particular school - the illegals go the fuck back to their home countries, the kids who don't meet grade standards go back down to the appropriate grade level, and if they fail again, you send them to the special school. You stratify the classes, so if you have 3 classes at 4th grade, you have the high class, low class, and "in danger of needing remedial attention" class. For the kids in that last class, you hold open parent/teacher conferences every two weeks, with a mandatory meeting twice a semester (middle and end). If a kid misses a homework assignment, the parent gets called in for a conference to discuss what happened. You make damn sure that the parents are involved, and you make sure that the bright kids aren't bored out of their minds waiting for the slow kids to catch on to a concept they already learned three years ago.
You put back in the classes outside of standard "readin', ritin', 'rithmetic" fare - civics, home economics, team sports, individual sports. You make sure that the kids understand basic nutrition, basic government concepts and structure, basic economics (what a checkbook is, what a savings account is, what interest is, how to balance a home budget and live within their means), the importance of exercise both in health and in stress relief. You learn the value of concepts that cross over from class to class - for example, a kid who understands basic math but doesn't see the use will get it when you stick a budget in front of him and he realizes "holy shit, I actually do have a reason to know this stuff." A kid who doesn't understand why it's important to spell correctly and have good handwriting will suddenly have that little light bulb turn on when you tell him "ok, now you're going to write a letter to your congressman on something you feel is important."
You raise, not just little automatons who can pass some arbitrary national test (though if you teach them right the test will NOT be a problem), but good citizens.
Once that's done, if you still think the facilities need improvement, let's talk. If you still think they need some form of advanced technology in the classroom (study after study has shown arbitary use of "technology" is dubious at best, especially in lower grades), we can talk about it and try it out. If y
Be careful: a large part of the "fucking corrupt losers who should be shot" are from the right.
That was rather the point of saying "our entire system" was full of them... the Republicans certainly aren't blameless, they could certainly have been a lot more fiscally responsible (as well as a hell of a lot more responsible stopping these bad loans and pulling Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac into line in the early 2000's) than they were.
the fact is that 20% is nothing
Since you are obviously a product of the public edjamacashun factery, allow me to educate you.
"Nothing" is in fact 0.
20%, is in fact 20/100, or 1/5, written as "one fifth."
40%, our actual expenditure on the illegal kids, is in fact 40/100, or Two Fifths .
So, in order to illustrate to you the impact, allow me to offer this analogy: I will take away a full two fifths of your take-home pay, and see if you in fact feel this is "nothing."
Now, this doesn't even start to address the OTHER modes of impact in which the illegal kids injure the education of the children who actually have a right to be in the school - disruption to classes, time wasted, larger class size, safety dangers (again keeping in mind that a mere 20% of the high school class is responsible for 50% of the drug/gang crime problem), and the fact that we're forced to hire "ESL" teachers whose primary qualification is not a thorough understanding and breadth of experience in teaching the subject matter, but rather the ability to somewhat-passably speak the other language in question.
Yes, and they can often be a very quick stimulus, but they aren't necessarily the best stimulus. Lots of people believe (from what I've heard and read) that some kinds of spending can do better (you hear about the "multiplier").
Tax hikes also have a "multiplier", though - most taxes don't just hit the price of goods/services once, they hit them every time an affected economic transaction is made. Take fuel taxes; we buy fuel once (to bring raw materials to production), twice (to bring finished individual parts to the assembly factory), thrice (to get the product to the store), quadrice (for the consumer to bring it home), and possibly quintice or beyond if there's a warehouse stop anywhere along the way.
the question that tends to be a sticking point is "what's 'working' and what's 'unnecessary'?"
THAT is the point that needs to be argued, but instead of individually arguing, Congress/Obama has been lumping all their pork and waste into a big bill, called it "stimulus", and dishonestly screamed "OMG we have to do something now the sky is falling" when people questioned the need for all the garbage in the bill.
Yeah, and what some people seem to miss is that even if they don't technically "jack up" your taxes, the government will be spending money they don't have,
Only if the government fails to cut their spending from the things they don't absolutely need - hey, if I'm $100 below budget, I have to find something to cut. That's how budgeting works.
Our roads and bridges are crumbling,
Which means we should discuss what investment we should make into them, make wise investments that are sustainable rather than simply throwing $billions of band-aid "repairs" down the hole...
our Internet infrastructure is sub-par.
Funny. Internet infrastructure and phone lines are not government services. Implement equal-access laws similar to phone service for internet providers so that we get real marketplace competition, and watch it grow. The real reason our Internet infrastructure is crap is that 90% of America is stuck in de facto monopoly environments being charged far too much while the companies, having no competition (because quite literally no other company is allowed to enter the area), do nothing to expand/improve the infrastructure.
Also, our education system is in the shitter, partially because of an attitude that education is a personal investment or a privilege for the rich (or at least well-off) rather than something that benefits our society at large. (having a poorly educated citizenry in a democracy is a huge problem.)
Yeah, the uneducated do things like electing Obama.
But you don't fix education by simply throwing money at it - trust me, I work in the education sector. You fix education by making sure that parents are more involved, by stratifying classes to make sure that the bright kids are encouraged, and yes, by occasionally holding back the dimwits a grad or two or even sending them to special schools that can handle their problems.
On top of that, our healthcare system really is in bad shape.
And again... our healthcare system isn't a government system, unless you're specifically speaking of medicare/medicaid. The solution here isn't "government spends money", it's "the people/government smack the HMOs and so-called insurance agencies over the head and stop them from defrauding us."
I heard one of the things Republicans focused on cutting was food stamps-- as though $3 a day is too extravagant a food budget.
Actually, what they were speaking of was making sure food stamps go to those who need them rather than handing them out willy-nilly and to people who don't even have the legal right to be in this country.
Try researching what you are saying before spouting nonsense please.
I wouldn't mind if Republicans were asking for sensible things
I work in the education sector. I've seen the numbers. In the district I'm in, fully 20% of our students have dubious (or simply no) immigration papers. We spend 40% of our budget on ESL classes and ESL-certified teachers just to try to educate those 20% of the kids who shouldn't even be here, and during the time they mix with the normal kids in classes, they disrupt the class flow and require constant re-explanation of even basic concepts.
If that weren't bad enough, on our high school level (and we have 10,000 high-school kids in district), ~50% of drug/gang arrests are due to that 20% of the student population. It varies up and down a little year by year, but 50% is the 5-year average.
You tell me to "not push that button"? This is not a problem we can ignore. The legislation that failed the past two years when Bush, McCain, and others were trying to push Amnesty failed because Amnesty is not a workable policy.
You go be the one to tell an American parent that their kid was shot by an illegal immigrant kid while at school (fortunately the kid lived, he was just hit in the leg after the crossfire between two rival Mexican gang members), THEN tell me we don't need to deal with this problem at its source and properly enforce our borders and our laws.
But don't worry! Now that Obama is elected, he'll come save you... oh, wait, right.
Obama was one of the extortion artists for ACORN who started off the whole "write loans that will never work, then bundle them as "securities" bit... and also just-so-happens to have been the second biggest recipient of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac lobbying money during the time when their financial fraud was being uncovered. :(
So much for help coming from him. The policies currently wandering from his administration are like amputating a leg to get rid of a sprained ankle.
Why?
The "You get $X per kid" mentality is part of why school districts pad their numbers and school administrations make it so difficult to get rid of problem kids. You lose a kid, you lose their $. Thus kids who are causing REAL problems, who should be shipped off to special schools or even to juvenile hall, wind up instead hurting the education of the other kids around them. You can't have one of these kids in your class and expect the rest to learn - 90% of the teacher's time (or more) is spent just dealing with that one kid.
My main argument was (at least I hoped), that the federal government can ensure that everybody gets the same funding
When has the federal government ever done a good job of doing this? Ever? One definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, expecting different results. Throwing money to the Federal government is a way to get the money eaten up in bureaucracy, not to get it where it's needed.
I'd argue very strongly that a child born in po-dunk USA with a tiny tax base gets the ability to access the same learning materials and brainpower (i.e. teachers) as somebody living in some rich suburb full of software engineers.
Without some marxist/communist scheme of assigning "you go here, you go here, you go here" to your teachers? I'd be interested in hearing how you expect this to work. Are you following "robin hood" funding reallocation like Texas tried, which wound up making certain counties and cities cap out their property tax rates, cut teachers and institute 40-child classrooms instead of 30 and STILL have to cut their own local police and fire departments trying to pay what they "owed" to some other county's schools?
Regardless, there IS a difference in any area in the cost of educating kids, and in what will be available to them outside of school. If you think there are honestly counties that are "too poor" to give their kids a quality education, then let those counties apply to their home state for funding. Handing out a federal "every school gets $x per student" allocation is PURE BULLSHIT.
But... *gasp* that isn't simply the Democrat way! The Democrat way is to simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning, call it "solved", and then gasp again when the problem comes up next election cycle and they need to "fix" it by throwing more money without any oversight or planning... repeat ad nauseum.
And while we are at it, lets dump Brown vs. Board of Education [brownvboard.org] too while we are at it, eh? After all, if a state wants to start segregating schools you can just move to another state, right?
Dishonest Debate Tactics 101: set up strawman, knock down strawman. Nobody in this debate has ever suggested re-segregating schools.
Now, there HAS been a suggestion which has been sometimes accused of such, which is that of repealing mandatory busing and sending most kids to the school closest to their home. Since ethnotypes and immigrant populations tend to self-segregate in choice of living locations, this would mean that, yes, you'd have a number of schools that wound up looking like they were "segregated." The upside to this, however, is that it makes parental involvement and community involvement more likely. Kids who are bused to school for 3+ hours every day don't participate in extracurriculars as much. They don't have as much time to work on their homework or study. Their parents aren't as involved in the school as when it's right in the neighborhood, either. And as mentioned above, involved parents = better performing kids.
Or if the state wants all their public schools to teach intelligent design, you should either hold your nose or move--under no circumstance should you appeal to those pesky activist judges in the the federal courts, right?
Funny. There are all sorts of things you could have mentioned here - sex education about homosexuality during kindergarten, pro-"one world government" propaganda, moral relativism, revisionist history that tries to paint honest and noble men (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) as evil bastards and evil bastards (Che Guevara) as noble men... What had you on "intelligent design"?