Economic recession has eroded tax bases, leading to under-funding and historic deficits. Listen carefully and you hear a key word over and over - 'discretionary.' Discretionary spending it the part of any budget that can be negotiated. Why should budgets be negotiated? Start at zero every year and there is nothing to negotiate. Give instructions to spend the money as they would their own, then again this has proven to be a bad idea. After all our current recessionary state is due to folks spending what they did not have.
After generations of spending nonexistent money, individuals and governmental entities from coast to coast are facing financial truths. Many lacked the necessary financial skills thus the current situation. Rampant spending has hurled us all into debating the financial crisis that should have never existed if spending had been controlled at all levels. Governments got use to spending what they did not have. Several school districts in this state floated bond elections that paid for items like uniforms, electronic devices, books, maps, band instruments, etc. The bond election became the 'credit card' for a number of school districts in this state. The life of most of these items will be exhausted by the time the bond is paid off. Exactly like a consumer 'credit card'.
After all this spending taxpayers have finally said enough! However, modest budget-cutting suggestions are condemned by those who have grown used to government bloated. The public school lobby is a live and well walking the halls of the state house in Austin. You hear the stuck-pig squeals of the public schools of this state who have no intention of weaning themselves from taxpayer-funded largess. Budget cutting discussions in Wisconsin had teachers abandoning kids and classrooms to swirl in anger at the Wisconsin statehouse. Caused sympathetic doctors to write phony medical excuses for the teachers so they would not be in violation of their collective bargaining agreements with regards to their absences from the classroom.
Permanently reshaping the financial landscape in taxpayers favor is something that has to happen if we wish a more vibrant future.
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A "stuck-pig squeal" has appeared on the front page of the local rag the past two weeks.
The squeal has come from none other than the local School Super. Although both she and her school board have known for at least six months that the State would be cutting revenues to the schools, neither has bothered, at least publicly, to offer any plan to make up the shortfalls that WILL come, other than to squeal for MORE taxes.
No mention of a plan to CUT spending. Of course, it is not the Super's job to lobby for taxes, either in Pittsburg or in Austin. She sniffs that it's her right, as a private citizen/ taxpayer, to do so, while conveniently forgetting that her overbloated salary never gets spent for PISD taxes, county taxes, or much more than a lunch or two in Pittsburg.
Perhaps . . . or not, she might be willing to take a pay cut, as a way of helping PISD fund its looming shortfall.
If nothing else, it would give her a hint about how those of us who DO pay our taxes to PISD might feel about her plan to help us spend even more of our money in taxes.
No more squealing and no more taxes. Let her tend to her job of running the schools, and let the School Board tend to its job of deciding when or if new taxes are appropriate.
We elect them and they have to answer to us. She is hired help.
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