Ever since I got out of high school it seems like we've been pouring more and more into our schools for less and less. We passed the California Lottery on the promise that millions would flow into public schools. So now we have gambling but I have to send the teacher an annual care package of markers, tissue paper and pens. Everytime the Teacher Unions have told us "it's for the kids," we've kicked in for more money for "education," but the highest paid government official in most counties is the Superintendent of the biggest school system in the county. Teacher's salaries have gone up so that when you calculate in the time off for summers and vacations, they make more than 90% of people who don't have job security, but we don't have summer school for students who want to get ahead.
It just makes me wonder, where the bleep did the money go?
Retirement plans is probably the answer.
Matt Welch at Reason magazine offers this:
What's missing every time this debate comes up is any actual defense of the basic and 100 percent undeniable trend line–we are paying much, much more money to deliver government services that (with few exceptions) are not performing any better, and the single biggest line item in that cost increase is employee compensation. The burden of proof is on the people pocketing our taxpayer dollars, and yet they continue to dissemble, whine, and change the subject (and sometimes even shrug), rather than robustly defending the public policy mess they have been instrumental in creating. As long as We Are Out of Money, they (and their apologists) will rightly be on the defensive.
There is no doubt that in California, the public employee unions are running the government and economy like plantation owners of old. The public employee unions are dependable sources of money and manpower for politicians who will play the "rent seeking" game of syphoning money off of the private sector into the pockets of public employees, who generally being protected from market forces, such as recessions and arbitrary and capricious employment terminations, ought - in an economic sense - to have the benefits of that protection reflected in lower financial remuneration, as was the case before the Union-Bureacrat-Politican triangle came into its own in the 1960s.
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