Romney: We have too many teachers, cops, and firemen. Fire them!

WildCat said:
The people of California vote, and they vote for no tax increases time and time again. How are they not responsible for their own predicament?
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The big one here was Proposition 13. It actually did address a tax injustice and enabled small homeowners to hang on to their property. For example, let's say you have very modest home worth $100,000.00. You may be able to manage a 1% property tax of $1,000.00 per year. However, a 3% tax -- $3,000.00 per year -- would be a great strain. At the same tome, however, Prop. 13 was a bonanza for apartment house owners. The law needs to be amended to differentiate between property one lives on and income property, with a graduated tax based on how large and profitable the income property is.

One thing I've never been able to understand is why funds for education come exclusively, or at least disproportionately, from property taxes. Is this the case only in California, or is it the same elsewhere?

As to Californians being responsible for their state's money problems, remember that these problems also plague those of us who did vote for certain tax increases. There are also localities where people voted to increase taxes on themselves to increase services. For example, a number of years ago the people of the city of Pasadena voted to tax themselves extra to keep the central library open on Sundays from 1 - 5 P.M.
 
Unabogie said:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/romney-we-dont-need-more-firemen-more-policemen



So the official GOP position is that we have too many cops on the beat? Too many firemen fighting wild fires from global warming recurring flooding? Too many teachers to teach our kids?

Is that really the GOP normal now?
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Romney did not say "We have too many teachers, cops, and firemen. Fire them! ". But that aside do we have too many teachers, police or firemen? Where I live school does cost close to 20,000 per student every year. I have to think something is wrong there. Personally it is my belief there are too many teachers and administrators in my county and they are too highly paid.



We pay close to the highest property taxes in the nation and yet we have all volunteer firemen. So I cannot say we have too many firemen.
 
eeyore1954 said:
Romney did not say "We have too many teachers, cops, and firemen. Fire them! ". But that aside do we have too many teachers, police or firemen? Where I live school does cost close to 20,000 per student every year. I have to think something is wrong there. Personally it is my belief there are too many teachers and administrators in my county and they are too highly paid.



We pay close to the highest property taxes in the nation and yet we have all volunteer firemen. So I cannot say we have too many firemen.
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No, you do not have too many teachers. In LAUSD, they will have something like 43 kids to a classroom in high school.

http://laist.com/2009/03/25/lausd_teachers_get_contract_bonus_i.php

That's not too many teachers. They don't make too much money, either. I can't think of a more important job than teaching our kids. My sister in law is a LAUSD sub. She couldn't find work because LAUSD was hiring all their laid off full time teachers to do sub work. That means fewer teachers for more kids.

Do we have too many cops? Again, in Los Angeles, the "austerity" measures took over hundred cops off the beat.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/01/local/me-lapd1

How that doesn't translate to a worsening city is beyond me.

Obama wants to send AID to the states so that those support workers, cops, and teachers are rehired. So kids can go to school with less than 43 kids in their classes and cops can go back out on patrol.

Romney thinks that's a bad idea and wants to cut them further. I'm not sure how you cut the size of government without firing people.
 
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TimCallahan said:
One thing I've never been able to understand is why funds for education come exclusively, or at least disproportionately, from property taxes. Is this the case only in California, or is it the same elsewhere?
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It's a lot like that in Illinois, too, and I think it's stupid.

As to Californians being responsible for their state's money problems, remember that these problems also plague those of us who did vote for certain tax increases. There are also localities where people voted to increase taxes on themselves to increase services. For example, a number of years ago the people of the city of Pasadena voted to tax themselves extra to keep the central library open on Sundays from 1 - 5 P.M.
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I think the people of Pasedena are smart. They need to outsource some of that to the rest of California, because if Californians don't wake up and start increasing some taxes they're going to see things slide right down the tubes but quick.

The basic premise is pretty simple: if you want the government to provide a service (cops, education, roads, etc), then you'd better be willing to pay for it. That means taxes.

There is such a locked-in and stupid mentality (on both sides of the aisle) regarding these things in California, from what I can tell. The Democrats are dug in and trying to oppose any kind of budget cuts, while the Republicans are dug in and trying to oppose any kind of tax increases. It is quite simply a recipe for disaster, because anyone who understands economics 101 realizes that you don't get out of a budget hole that deep without doing both at the same time.

Of course, the same argument is going on at the federal level. I just can't wait to see when that circus gets going again :rolleyes:
 
MattusMaximus said:
I think the people of Pasedena are smart. They need to outsource some of that to the rest of California, because if Californians don't wake up and start increasing some taxes they're going to see things slide right down the tubes but quick.
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If only it were that simple. This is a legacy of Prop 13.
Jarvis created a similarly impregnable institution. When he rode the wave of anger over skyrocketing property-tax assessments to pass Proposition 13 in 1978, he included a two-thirds vote requirement for the passage of any new taxes in California — an insurmountable obstacle built on populist allergy to any kind of new levy.
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Jarvis was a 1970's version of a Tea Party Patriot (sic). He really did a number on California.

Daredelvis
 
RandFan said:
It would be nice if a long term and broad based vision were part of conventional conservative thinking. There was a time that conservatives actually cared about infrastructure and eduction. Now it would seem that anything government does beyond the military is unnecessary or better done privately. I think Piscivore has a valid point. And it's not that they're mean. It's that they just don't care.

The point is this, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, they couldn't get elected on their records today.



Infrastructure? Roads? Education? Fairness? Please. Conservatives don't do that anymore.
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Nor does Obama etal although he mentions those things, but most here will vote for him again anyway.

Hypocrites all.
 
Ookay... I see California tax code being used naively as an example in this thread -- there's a few things that need to be understood before we can apply the Golden State to other cases:

Prop 13: Almost irrelevant in terms of education. While this is often cited as the dagger in the back of education funding, the fact is that per-pupil spending remained stable until 1985, seven years after Prop 13's passage, and the relative quality of California education began to decline as early as 1974, well before Prop 13.

Prop 13 is also a double-bill. It is commonly understood as limiting real estate taxes, resulting over time in a net decrease in property taxes in real dollars, ala Tea Party shenanigans, but this is only half of the effect. It's also wrong anyway -- in some periods, property taxes have increased at rates higher than the increase in household earning, even after the "freeze." There is also the Mello-Roos real estate tax in many areas which is a flat-out circumvention of Prop 13 (and to my mind wholly unethical). The other, more concrete effect of Prop 13 is to require a two-thirds majority for tax measures to pass on future ballots. This is an issue.

California Never Increases Taxes: Not true at all. Calfornia sales taxes are hiked routinely, most recently in 2008-2009 as part of desperate budget-balancing initiatives (which naturally remain unbalanced). Personal income tax is hiked frequently, one memorable recent incident being the "millionaire tax" as part of the California Mental Health Services Act of 2004, which stapled an extra 1% tax on income over $1M with a specific earmark.

We've also implemented a great deal of quasi-taxes under the banner of "saving education," the first coming to mind being the California State Lottery. Fat lot of good it did! Yet this "idiot tax" remains.

Overall, today California ranked 11th out of 50 in terms of per-capita tax revenue, versus being 13th out of 50 in terms of per-capita income. Therefore, 34 years of Prop 13 have not turned California into a revenue-poor wasteland or a Libertarian Utopia. Seriously, the idea that California doesn't or cannot tax enough.. is insane.

And yet, our schools still suck.

One of the biggest problems we have is that so much of the California budget is driven by mandates. Lots of crazy formulas exist on which revenue has to be spent on what, an incredible array of spot-taxes and special fees all dedicated to special programs (which wind up getting raided anyway by Legislative sleight-of-hand), and complicated chain-reaction ballot initiatives every couple of years as the Governor gets frustrated with the Legislature and tries to do an end-run around an increasingly broken State Constitution.

It is also not correct to state that people "demand ever-increasing services and don't want to pay for them." Over the last ten years the State Government has been gradually underserving the public, starting with furloughs and parks closures, and now we're about to cut several more days out of the school year just because. I've also been somewhat heartened by the decreasing success of crazy bond measures -- used to be that any ol' cause could get on the ballot and get a $5G bond issue, before never being heard from again, but these days they pretty much all go down to defeat. One notable exception is the "Bullet Train," but the Bullet Train is utterly doomed as its price tag now exceeds the initial promise by 200%+, proving that we were in fact baited and switched. A pity that one won't be fixed, in my opinion, but it's DOA in the end like the rest of the bond measures.

Another major, major problem with California's budget, as some have noted, is optimistic pension plans for State workers -- even if we overlook abuse and fraud of these plans, which is fairly common. However, there are steps being taken in the right direction, notably in San Diego just a couple of weeks ago. Slowly we are going to see a conversion from State-funded (and budget-formulaic) pensions to employee-contributed 401K style plans, and this will eventually fix some of the logjam. It'll take another decade, but this is finally moving in the right direction.

It also comes at a good time if you think now's the time to hire more teachers. I tend to think that it is, provided we aren't stupid about it.

There's a lot of lessons in California for the rest of the country, but take care you get the details right. It's more complicated than soundbite reporting or major political campaigns would have you believe.
 
BenBurch said:
No, that was not in direct regard to the schools but to society in general, and is in any case not federal policy of any sort, but Constitutional.

Brown v Board of Education was directly about the policy of the Topeka school board. The court was setting policy for Topeka (and for everybody else by extension.) Direct orders of which children go to which schools.
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Yes, a policy which ran afoul of the US Constitution.

Again, I have no idea what this has to do with federal money used as a jobs program for local police, firefighters, and teachers.
 
BenBurch said:
Ah. Here in Illinois they want to renege on pensions already being paid out. And that is simply wrong.
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No, it is the right thing to do and the only option left at this point. The $150 billion in unfunded pension obligations (both state and local) simply cannot be paid, it's almost mathematically impossible at this point.

At the end of the day to whom does the government have a greater responsibility - to government employees, or the people of the state they are obligated to provide services to?

We're already throwing people out of nursing homes and closing down last-resort mental institutions. Many, many more service cuts are in the pipeline. And yet the people who double dip, get pension sweeteners, get pensions many times more than they ever earned on the job, took advantage of sweetheart loopholes to collect pensions for a job they held for one day, etc etc (all as revealed by local news media over the past few years) still get to rake in the cash. Convicted purjuror and known Chicago police torturer Jon Burge gets $68,000 a year in pension, even collecting it from his prison cell.

The people getting thrown out of nursing homes deserve better than this. The severely mentally ill losing the only home they've been able to function in deserve better than this. The homeowner struggling with their skyrocketing property taxes deserve better than this. The business that closed because they had to wait years for payments from the state deserve better than this.

In short, the people of Illinois have a right to basic government services that is not trumped by a tiny handful of the populace feeding from that trough the corrupt politicians they own laid out for them.
 
WildCat said:
Yes, a policy which ran afoul of the US Constitution.

Again, I have no idea what this has to do with federal money used as a jobs program for local police, firefighters, and teachers.
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The Federal domain is and should be involved in matters of the state for a number of reasons including interstate commerce and the general defense.

The general defense requires educated cannon-fodder. No way you can get around that. If we needed a draft and the only people we could find couldn't read or write, we'd be screwed.

Both commerce and general defense require police be in every locale, I hope for obvious reasons.

Firefighters are first responders in event of national emergencies (like 9/11) and so are also in the federal domain.

Sorry, but the world is a whole lot more complicated than it was in 1900, which seems to be your benchmark year for what is properly federal and what is not.
 
BenBurch said:
The Federal domain is and should be involved in matters of the state for a number of reasons including interstate commerce and the general defense.

The general defense requires educated cannon-fodder. No way you can get around that. If we needed a draft and the only people we could find couldn't read or write, we'd be screwed.

Both commerce and general defense require police be in every locale, I hope for obvious reasons.

Firefighters are first responders in event of national emergencies (like 9/11) and so are also in the federal domain.

Sorry, but the world is a whole lot more complicated than it was in 1900, which seems to be your benchmark year for what is properly federal and what is not.
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So to be clear, you want all schools and first responders to be paid for and run by the federal government?

Might not be a bad idea, no collective bargaining for federal workers... ;)
 
WildCat said:
So to be clear, you want all schools and first responders to be paid for and run by the federal government?

Might not be a bad idea, no collective bargaining for federal workers... ;)
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That's a straw man. What Obama is talking about and what Romney opposes is that in economic downturns, states can't run deficits, so they fire teachers, cops, and firemen to help cover the lack of revenue. More people lose jobs and look for help, which taxes the states even more. Those people, without any help, will stop spending money in the local economy, so more people lose jobs. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Historically, the feds will pick up the missing revenue so that states don't lose these important and essential people when they need them the most. That is, until the Kenyan Usurper came along, and now federal help for struggling states is SocioFascisticIslamicAntiColonialism.

No one is suggesting that all schools and first responders be run by the feds. That's just a false assertion.
 
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