Posted by
Playful Walrus on Monday, November 08, 2010 4:16:33 PM
Two stories ran in yesterday's
Los Angeles Times, conveniently after the elections.
This one, from Mitchell Landsberg, is about how the teachers unions have blocked worthwhile education reform. This is how the story is titled:
Influence of Teachers Unions in Question
The groups have been slow to come to terms with the push for reform. Some see them as obstacles to change, and even union sympathizers agree that their voice in the education debate has been muted.
Would have been nice to get Jerry Brown or Barbara Boxer's reactions to that.
Teachers unions donate almost exclusively to Democratic politicians and have usually been able to count on their support. Obama has disappointed them — and the feeling appears to be mutual.
Join the club.
In 2008, the single largest contributor to state and federal campaigns was the National Education Assn., which spent $56 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The California Teachers Assn. has spent $211 million in the last decade trying to influence state campaigns, roughly double the amount of the next largest group, according to a report by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
$211,000,000. Do you know where your unions dues are?
In local school board campaigns, not only are unions usually the largest spender by far, they typically supply the largest volunteer force of campaign workers.
Yes... "volunteer".
The problems of unions extend into the culture at large. Consider Davis Guggenheim, the director of "Waiting for 'Superman,' " a documentary that paints unions as enemies of reform. He said that, as a Democrat, he believes in "the essence" of unions but that they can be on the right side — or the wrong side — of change. Even Oprah Winfrey has joined the fray, demanding to know, "Why can't you just fire bad teachers?"
A. J. Duffy, president of UTLA, said he believes that the challenges unions are facing are cyclical, not permanent, and that they are motivated by a pernicious corporate influence in education. "I think there's a fear that public education will be dismantled, rather than fixed."
That would be awesome!
The second article, from Marc Lifsher, is headlined this way:
Unemployment Payouts Push California deeper Into Debt
The state is borrowing $40 million a day from the federal government to provide assistance to jobless workers, but has resisted changing the formulas it uses to determine and fund those benefits.
Why do anything that might make things better?
California's fund for paying unemployment insurance is broke.
With one in every eight workers out of a job, the state is borrowing billions of dollars from the federal government to pay benefits at the rate of $40 million a day.
The debt, now at $8.6 billion, is expected to reach $10.3 billion for the year, two-thirds greater than last year. Worse, the deficit is projected to hit $13.4 billion by the end of next year and $16 billion in 2012, according to the California Employment Development Department, which runs the program.
Guess who is going to end up paying? All you folks in other states. I'm almost certain of it.
Interest on that debt will soon start piling up, forcing the state to come up with a $362-million payment to Washington by the end of next September.
Or the Democrats could simply bail out a blue state.
Continued borrowing, meanwhile, means that employers face an automatic hike in their federal unemployment insurance taxes, pushing up annual payroll costs $21 a year for each worker.
Those costs are expected to more than double over the next five years if California continues to borrow from the federal government.
It just gets better and better, doesn't it?
The state Legislature has turned away two attempts to raise payroll taxes to fix the deficit and ignored a similar proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Now California's governor-elect, Jerry Brown, has to devise a way to minimize the tax burden on employers without drastically slashing benefits for the jobless - and get lawmakers on board.
Yeah, good luck with that.Hey, here's an idea. How about we make parents responsible for the education of their own children? Oh, and how about we encourage people to save their own money to pay for things like - when they are unemployed? And then, people could form voluntary alliances and associations to deal with these things, maybe form nonprofits or businesses or hire a company, and work with family and their religious congregations.