Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Solving the wrong problem in MichiganDollars & Sense blogs, and some of our readers blog, too. Today, subscriber Richard Murphy justifies his lack of support for Michigan ballot proposal 5, which allocates half a billion additional funding for K-university education.There is no problem that the schools face that is isolated to the schools - all of these are symptomatic of larger issues, at both the state and national levels. At all levels, we need to fight the decades-old mantra of cut-taxes-cut-spending-cut-taxes-more, and the schools are an important weapon in this fight. We must resist the urge to patch over the schools' budget problems, to mandate funding without examining the larger issues involved and thereby pit our schools against everything else that is important to us. This is an exellent example of the divide-and-conquer tactics that Norquistian conservatism uses to maintain the race to the bottom. ... Proposal 5 is a superficial band-aid cure, and will only serve to sabotage system-wide well-being. Schools are the canary in the social coal mine, and offering the canary an aspirin won't improve the air. Dollars & Sense coverage of state budget problems: Balancing State Budgets: Who Will Pay?; State Budgets in Crisis Technorati Tags: state budget, school funding Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
