Protesting the Plight of Public Education

The article is descriptive. The Independent needs to do an analysis of the budget crisis and probably should begin by looking at the state tax structure. Only with such an analysis can the readers then understand the changes needed to promote the funding of schools at all levels.

I cannot resist commenting on Das Williams. I know he is ambitous as he is often running for office. But does he not have some responsiblity to articulate a solution that is substantive in nature? His rhetoric does a disservice to the vulenerable who cannot afford these costs now associated with going to school.

Lots of unemployed people on the streets, lots of broke, no-degree having ex-students on the streets, and newly released inmates. Then throw the state government trying to tax anything they can. Sounds like a bomb in the making. Have fun this summer in California.

Good thing we have these unions, that those billions of dollars is going to, who will protect everybody.

Great to see such activism and connection to one another through a common issue!

And why don't yall just leave Das alone. So what if he wants to be a politician and serve his community. Unless you are willing to do it yourself, take the options we have and so far he seems like a good one. He does show up everywhere though! Does the guy sleep?

Also, I've heard him mention different "enviro-friendly" revenue sources in the past that could help with funding education... ie: a bag tax at grocery stores, and a sin tax.
Have not heard him suggest the proper regulation of medical marijuana as a revenue source, but these dispensary owners are walking away with a heap of profit. I would think some of that can be cut from their pocket and put into our education system.

But really, cuts to education. What does that really say about our state's priorities?

Any of these protesting geniuses have suggested solutions to the problem of NOT ENOUGH MONEY? Or are they just, like, ME FIRST? As for Das - all hat no cattle.

Like BP, I too would welcome an impartial look at the state budget and how California funds that budget. Then we might be better able to understand the crises we're having in education, etc. I think Jerry Roberts did a few columns on the effects of Prop 13 on revenue generation last summer that were helpful.

A functioning democracy REQUIRES an educated public.

The US today has ceased to be a functioning democracy, but rather a corporate plutocracy run by a junta of tycoons. Washington DC answers ONLY to big business, both domestic and foreign: 98.5% of all DC's 40,000 lobbyists are corporate brown-nosers. As far as our alleged "representatives" are concerned (with a tiny minority of notable exceptions), we-the-American-people can go take a flying f***.... unless we're in the billionaires club.

As far as the powers-that-be are concerned, education is on the bottom of the priority list, alongside most other programs which are useful/essential in maintaining a civilized society.

So, in the eyes of the mafiocracy in DC, the idea of spending money educating our kids is regarded as more tiresome than essential ... especially when a educated public is regarded as a threat, and especially if such funding interferes with, for a glaring example, war profiteering.

Remember Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator of WWII? He aimed for a form of government which was a "merging of state and corporate power"... and popularized a word defining such. Go look it up... it begins with F and has 7 letters.

Lots of unemployed people on the streets ..."
-- AZ2SB

I think that's a bigger problem than most people think. One of the largest, if not the largest, components of revenue for the state of CA is derived from personal income taxes. So in a poor economy, that's a lot of lost revenue for funding schools, etc.

I often hear people screaming to cut taxes in CA. But do we really have outrageously high taxes in CA? Searching on the internet, I've found lots of ideologically spun views of tax revenue data. But one source that seems to be impartial is the Center for the Continuing Study of the CA Economy. They have a nice overview of state tax revenue here:

http://www.ccsce.com/pdf/Numbers-oct0...

There are some really surprising data in this article that runs counter to the popular notion that we have really high taxes in CA.

No cuts, no fees! Education should be free!” Really?

Here's Daves', Hey, hey, ho, ho, there is no more dough!!

Or even a rap tune, "I think you want to tax me, but I want it free. I think you are so greedy just give it all to me. I haven't really earned it but that should never count....you damn well better give it or I'm gonna shout and shout."

Or EastBeaches favorite, "Karl Marx, Trotsky I really do not care arbeit macht frei we really want it here!" Daniel Petry

Wow, such musical talent and catchy lyrics. Mr.Petry you amaze me.:)

We certainly DO need an educated public for our Constitutional Republic (we are NOT a Democracy - that is quite different) to function. Look at the blogs. Look at who gets elected - repeatedly. Maybe education, esp in the greater good, would help. No doubt education in financial matters is needed. When most kids can't balance a checkbook coming out of high school, how can one possibly expect them to understand the long term effect of fat pensions on their future taxes. This is one reason people like Carbajal keep getting elected.

Prop 13 is a perfect example of good intentions gone awry and with perfect was the worst thing ever to happen to public education (BTW I benefit from Prop 13 just like others do). 32 years after its passage, the unintended consequences are killing us. My neighbor pays 10% of the tax I pay on a roughly comparable house. Why? Because he inherited his house from his mommy, while I paid for mine. Prop 13 is creating a landed gentry in California similar to the "upper" class in the UK before the "proletariat" took away their property. I can't believe this was the original intent. No wonder California is failing and is the laughingstock of the western world.

Two suggestions:

1. Eliminate the provision in Prop 13 that allows heirs to inherit their parents' tax basis along with their home. Figure out some way, perhaps over a 10 year period, to bring these folks' taxes up to a more reasonable value, perhaps by resetting their tax bill to 1% of the home's value when the house was inherited and giving them 10 years to catch up on their (new) back taxes. It's one thing to protect older homeowners from losing their homes; it's entirely another to fund the lifestyles of their heirs at the expense of the other taxpayers. Think about it - the heirs are more likely to have kids in school and arguably are not paying their fair share of education expenses. While we struggle to find enough money to fund education.

2. Don't apply Prop 13 to commercial property. Rents are still driven my supply and demand and this provision of Prop 13 serves only to enrich the landlords (who, God knows, already get enough in this town).

Let the outraged special interest group screaming begin.

These kids were a bunch of whining Commies. If they want "free education" they should go live in France and see how much they love it. In America people pay for our own well being and don't depend on a Nanny Government to give us everything we demand, yet strip our power to choose and compete in the process. America has gone so soft, these kids need a slap in the face and to be told to get a job and support themselves. What good is being in college for their entire lives good for anyways? Half of these kids milk the system and are still dumb as a box of rocks. Maybe if they were forced to specialize in a profession much earlier, they could actually learn something more useful than how to spew out Marxist rhetoric. Oh man, when did our world become so PC ?

Thanks AZ2SB.

JohnL - as usual you are right on the money, "when most kids can't balance a checkbook coming out of high school, how can one possibly expect them to understand the long term effect of fat pensions on their future taxes." Perfect statement. The problem is that most boomers have the same problem. Especially those in office.

I have spent hours and hours teaching my girlfriend's daughter simple checkbook balancing and finances. She had a hard time understanding the concept of interest until she wanted to borrow some money to buy her cellphone. She figured it out real quick!!

She lent some money to her dad (who voted for Obama) and when she presented him with a contract and was going to charge him 9% (bad credit risk she said) he flipped out. Her comeback? "Dad who do you think I am...Pelosi." We about died with laughter..but she wasn't laughing.

Anyway, good post.

An increasingly dumbed down population mixed with the ills of homelessness, staggerging debt, and a host of other ills makes for a time bomb. A simple study of the French Revolution draws many similarities to what is happening today.

I just hope reason and not emotion bring for positive change, but the way it looks now doesn't give me reason to think it will happen.

Hopefully, mass conciousness will ask itself how we got into this mess and avoid the Year Zero mentality.

University Students and parents need to re-focus their anger on the main issues affecting why there is so little money left for education, and why tuition rates are going up.

1) salaries are out-of-line with the market and economic conditions;

2) definied retirement benefits (vs. defined contribution benefits) have a billion dollar deficit which taxpayers are currently OBLIGATED to fund.

Re: University Salaries
taken from: http://tinyurl.com/ycvxg3u
Excerpt:
Here is a some information gathered the other the other day on university salaries. I started with the University of California.

However, I am sure salary insanity exists at all major universities.

I did a search for "Gross Pay Greater Than $75,000" and found 38,041 hits.

A search for "Gross Pay Greater Than $100,000" turned up 21,529 hits.

Gross Pay Greater Than $150,000 Has 7,669 Hits

Amazingly, schools have the gall to complain they are being underfunded by the state. They are not underfunded, there are tens of thousands of school employees who are overpaid.

Re: DEFINED RETIREMENT BENEFITS:
A good read on the looming $1-Trillion State's debt can be found here:
http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_de...

I am hoping that the State's will be able to move to defined contribution plans (from defined benefits plans) just like the private sector has migrated to.

A good read is the NJ govenor's address found here:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogsp....

Here's an excerpt:

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.

Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

In short, there's enough money in education (and public fire, and police, and transit workers, etc.) , it's just going to the wrong priorities within those systems!

Yup, lots of people in the UC system make more than $200,000 a year. Guess what? Most of them are medical school professors. Most of there paycheck comes because they are world experts and rich people come from all over the world to receive care from them. UCSF and the UCLA medical centers are amazing places. But the taxpayer does not pay the high doctors' salaries.

The other highly paid UC people are either athletic coaches, senior administrators, or Nobel prizewinners.

Rank and file UC workers have salaries about 20% below market right now. Was 10%, but the recent cuts have taken them down to 20%.

As for UC pensions, the California taxpayer has not contributed a dime to them since 1990. UC has a pretty reasonable pension policy... nothing like the Calpers folks. Just about all UC folks hired since 1990 do stash money in their 403(b) and 457 plans, because they think the defined benefit portion is headed for the pension guarantee trust corporation, aka, bankruptcy.

Now the UC pension plan does take the compensation up about 10%. Correcting for that, rank&file UC compensation used to be about equal to market. The recent cuts and precariousness of the pension system has cut UC rank&file compensation to rather less than market conditions.

"Show me the money!"-Jerry Maguire.

"Rank and file UC workers have salaries about 20% below market right now ..."
-pardall

I don't know about other fields of study, but in the tech area (engineering, sciences, etc.) even in the best of times tech professionals know there's much more money to be made in the private sector.

"UCSB students, many who were bused into downtown Santa Barbara on Thursday”

Bused? Really? By whom? The SDS? I was trying to figure out why the California communist party and the unions would coordinate this so much. Then I realized that they not only want money…they want our children.

I dug a little deeper into this so called “protest”. What did I find? Here’s a short list of some really freedom loving organizations ... just the kind of crap we want indoctrinating our children:

Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) - think SDS.

Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) - ya gotta love those Che t-shirts.

International Socialist Organization

Statewide UPTE

Solidarity Alliance at UCB

SocialistWorker.org

SEIU 1000

Association of Raza Educators keep those illegals coming.

San Francisco Labor Council

Third World Assembly at UCB

SWAT at UCB

The national student Coordinating Committee of United
California Partnership/Stop the Cuts Coalition.

Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) - including bombs.

SEIU 1021

California Prison Moratorium Project

Rouge Forum

Bay Area United Against War

The 2009 National Assembly of US Labor Against the War

Peralta Federation of Teachers

Lovely group of nice little commies, just lovely.

Did you see the PTA there, or concerned mothers and fathers, or even tax payers? Nope. What you saw was a mixture of retread baby boomers who miss the good old days and communists that want to teach your children.

The budget impasse is one thing but this is evil. Pure evil. Daniel Petry

"jcrdan," you have created an interesting list, but I'm skeptical that the groups you cite would be at this Santa Barbara rally; just picking five or six from the middle of your list of Shame:

- SEIU 1000 represents Sacramento Workers;
- Third World Assembly and SWAT at UCB are active on the Berkeley campus;
- San Francisco Labor Council, Bay Area United Against War, and Peralta Federation of Teachers, .

And calling protesters "commies?" How Cold War of you!

You may suffer from an extraordinarily low threshold for both research and evil, my well-intended fellow patriot.

If these students are at UCSB with scholarship money I really doubt they are just using the system to party at college. It takes hard work to keep that money coming and it doesn't cover all the bills

I find a number of these comments to be extremely offensive to California's college students. "whining commies"? seriously?

Wanting a public education to be affordable should not warrant being called a whiner.

Actually I’m right on target. The National Day of Action to Defend Education was coordinated by all those listed plus more. So let’s clarify a number of additional supporters for this glorious event.

Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Party USA, Fight Imperialism — Stand Together?

La Raza tried to make the case that illegal aliens should be able to use in-state tuition.

M.E.Ch.A was also involved, and they only want to reclaim the Southwest for Mexico. You know, the group whose logo is an eagle with a stick of dynamite in its claw.

Bail Out the People Movement is a front group for International Answer, a pro Communist Party group. Why are they supporting the National Day of Action to Defend Education? Who do they want to educate and how?

Then there are such supporters as Destroy Industry in Raleigh, North Carolina. Yea, that’s a real organization that supports the protest made in Santa Barbara and across the nation.

So…"jcrdan," you have created an interesting list” I have created nothing. Just the facts. Interesting that they are listed as organizers, yes?

“But I'm skeptical that the groups you cite would be at this Santa Barbara rally;” I know that you like to obfuscate binky; but I never said they were there. I did say that they were organizers involved with the events.

SocialistWorker.org

Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) - including bombs

San Francisco Labor Council, Bay Area United Against War – yep

"And calling protesters "commies?" How Cold War of you!"

You think that just because the 'war' is over there are no communists anymore. How blind you are my friend. I just call as it is.

"You may suffer from an extraordinarily low threshold for both research and evil, my well-intended fellow patriot."

As for evil I have no patience for evil. I guess you do?

mginther - "Wanting a public education to be affordable should not warrant being called a whiner." Really?

Wanting somone else to pay for it would. Daniel Petry

Someone else doesn't pay for California higher education.

Because of California's steeply progressive tax structure means UC/CSU college grads, who make more money, easily pay for their educations with increased taxes throughout their life.

And who founded Silicon Valley, JPL, Google, Apple, etc?

For the most part, college graduates, many, many from the UC system.

UC and CSU *easily* pay for themselves.

What doesn't pay for itself is the rotten prison system in California, which has an *awful* recidivism rate and is about the most expensive in the country. No standards there, just $50,000 a year per prisoner pissed away on crap.

pardallchewinggumspot - I agree with you. The problem is that when I went down to the "protest" there were a ton of signs that read, "Education Should Be Free!!"

Sorry folks but it is not free and when there is NO MONEY then your contribution has to increase. Sorry. That's neither right wing or left wng. It is just the hard truth. Daniel Petry

When there is no money *CUT THE HORRIBLE WASTE IN THE HORRIBLE PRISON SYSTEM*.

UC and CSU grads already pay 2X the cost of their education to the state. Pro-tax folk like jcrdan want to increase that to 3X or 4X. Tax and spend, tax and spend, that is jcrdan.

Nice article in the LA Times today about the $1 billion in overtime paid by the state of California over the past year. Pretty much no-one in the UC or CSU system gets overtime, but the prison system is rife with overtime millionaires. Thanks jcrdan for supporting the disgusting waste there.

pardallchewinggumspot - are you frigging crazy. I'm pro-tax? Dude get a grip. I'm about as pro-tax as B.O. is pro-America. Not!

Have you ever read any of my articles? I think not.

I guess I should have taken my previous comment down to a 6th grade english comprehension level. Oh well. Here goes.

"Don't ask for a free ride from the system. The system is broke. The nation is broke, California is broke. There is NO MONEY - PERIOD!! This means that a student will have to pay more of their share not us tax-payers"

pardallchewinggumspot - Is that clear enough for you?

I guess you need a first-grade reading comprehension lesson, jcrdan. Guys like you hate education and want to keep California dominated by the Mexican Mafia selling drugs so the Prison Guards can keep getting rich, and you hate the profitable businesses like Apple, General Dynamics, and Google that need educated workers.

Students already pay back 2X the cost of their education, due to increased income tax due to increased earnings over their lifetime. You want to raise what they pay to 3X or 4X.

That is simply jcrdan's tax and spend tax and spend tax and spend to pay off the Prison Guards.

You never once say cut the real disgusting overspending in California, like the Prison Guards and their obscene overtime and retirement plans. You love to tax and spend on them.

Dude get a grip.

I could care less about tax and spend. I don't believe in it. I could care less about your fixation on prison guards. My position is to cut taxes, always has been always will be.

And son, I will allow you to use my real name, Daniel Petry.

Take your meds. Bi-polar white noise. buh bye.