Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

Taxpaying public soundly defeats the adding of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the budget

Karen Cota, a former school board member from Roxbury tried to amend the budget so that it was the same amount as the default budget, thus depriving the taxpaying public of any choice

Colleen Dreyfuss, former Chair of the MRSD, backed Cota’s efforts publicly. By secret ballot, the taxpayers present rejected that amendment by a vote of 115 to 94. The initial budget of $31,694,597 was then approved by the voters. The Monadnock School Taxpayers Association supported this budget, which is almost $700,000 LESS than the default budget.

Article #3 which created an Employee Health Insurance Trust fund was also passed by the voters. Thus, surplus tax money from health care costs will go into this fund and be used towards the next year’s health care costs. Many times in the past, surplus health care funds were treated almost like a “slush fund” and spent on anything the school board wanted, which would also raise the default budget. Last year’s health care cost surplus was $717,000. The Monadnock Schools Taxpayers Association initiated this warrant article and the school board carried it forward. This is a win for the beleaguered tax paying families of the school district.

Towards the end of the meeting, after most of the non-union voters had left, the teacher union amended article #9 which effectively deleted it from the ballot. This article was to see if the voters of the MRSD would direct the school board to support any and all efforts of the NH School Board Association to seek legislative appeal of RSA 273-A:12, Section VII, the provision in the statute commonly referred to as the statutory “Evergreen Clause”. This would restore local control in the collective bargaining and school district budget process. The Monadnock School Board and the Budget committee supported this article. The teacher union squashed it by removing it from the ballot, thus depriving the voting public of the right to vote on the initiative at all.

Union members and their supporters who remained, then used the forum to speak about article #9 to lambaste Mr. Bauries, the president of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association. When Mr. Bauries got up to speak to the article, the union members, in unison, all walked out of the gym. Bauries made the point that even under the proposed budget, the cost per student in MRSD is $16,733- the highest in the area.

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Heritage Foundation

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama vowed that his administration would enforce a three-year spending freeze to help dig the country out of a “massive fiscal hole.” But the President’s spending freeze would only apply to one-eighth of all spending and save a mere $15 billion. That’s just a drop in the bucket, especially considering the $3.8 trillion 2011 budget proposal the White House released on Monday. According to these figures, freeze or no freeze, that “massive fiscal hole” is about to get much deeper.

The President’s new budget commits the nation to “trillions more in spending than taxpayers can afford,” points out Heritage Foundation budget policy analyst Brian Riedl. $2 trillion more, to be exact. With all this new spending, the “freeze” will do little to address the record budget deficit projected for fiscal 2010. In fact, the deficit will continue to hover at levels not seen since World War II for the next ten years.

Instead of real solutions, the budget proposal offers more of the same (operative word “more”). As Heritage’s Conn Carroll explains, it is “full of billions of dollars in new spending, for failed government programs, higher taxes on American families and businesses, and deficit spending for as far as the eye can see.”

These aggressive spending measures would be unaffordable even during good budget times. Rather than attempting to spend its way out of debt, which is an inherently flawed concept, Riedl suggests that the federal government adopt some genuine spending reforms. These would include:

- Taking back leftover funds from TARP and the failed stimulus bill;
- Enacting tough spending caps — not temporary spending freezes — to help lawmakers prioritize where money is allocated;
- Disclosing the massive unfunded obligations of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and outline long-term budgets for these programs;
- Reforming entitlement programs, which currently present the greatest domestic challenge our nation faces.

“Currently, the President’s budget does nothing to address the nation’s serious short-term and long-term fiscal problems — and indeed makes them worse,” writes Riedl. Though not easy, Riedl’s proposed reforms would permanently reduce the deficit and present a better alternative to record government and enormous tax increases.

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National Review
February 8, 2010

Reporters largely ignored it, but the Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing that Head Start’s positive effects peter out by the end of first grade. The study included 44 tests, of which 42 found no statistically significant and lasting improvement. Some positive results are to be expected when you run that many tests, and a footnote points out that the two apparently lasting results disappear after correcting for that tendency.

Andrew Coulson and Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute point out that school choice, on the other hand, appears to have lasting positive results. Naturally, the Democrats have expanded funding for Head Start while ending school choice in D.C.

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National Review
February 8, 2010

President Obama wants to slap a cumbrous new tax on American banks. “We want our money back,” he says. The government is expected to lose money on the bailouts–but not the money used to backstop the banks, which are paying it back, with interest. The real losses are expected to come from insurer AIG and from such untouchable Democratic holies as Fannie Mae, the heavily unionized automakers, and the foreclosure-prevention program.

Obama’s tax hike would harrow the prudent and imprudent alike, extracting billions of dollars from banks that never took bailout money in the first place. Anew tax on banks is a new tax on Americans’ savings and checking accounts. How big? It would have cost JPMorgan’s customers and shareholders $1.5 billion had it been in effect last year, another $1.5 billion for Bank of America, another $1 billion for Morgan Stanley, and would have punished many smaller banks to the tune of billions more. The Democrats are having trouble running against Republicans at the moment, so Obama seeks to run instead against Wall Street–and against the bailouts he voted for as a senator and expanded as president.

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National Review
February 8, 2010

In an effort to save the imperiled health-care bill, Democrats cut a tentative deal with organized labor that would exempt unionized employees from an excise tax on high-cost healthcare plans. Of the many unsavory bargains and rotten deals that have characterized the rush to get this thing passed (the “Louisiana Purchase,” the “Cornhusker Kickback,” etc.), the “Labor Loophole” surely takes the prize.

The deal, for which there is no conceivable public-policy justification, would mean that two people with the same plans and incomes would pay different taxes based on union membership. A few Democrats in the Senate tried to insert this provision at the committee level and were laughed out of the smoke-filled room, so nakedly obvious was the special-interest favoritism at work. That the Democratic party embraced this deal at the last minute is a sign of how desperate it became to pass a bill–any bill–that shoved the federal foot through the waiting-room door.

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National Review
February 8, 2010

The Obama administration’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top, has produced genuine headline news: The Democrats, usually seen kowtowing to organized labor’s demands, for once are standing up to a powerful union constituency. The Race to the Top grant competition would remunerate states for using students’ test scores in teacher evaluations, a practice the teachers unions have fought for years. A number of conservative reformers are backing the measure, but Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican, recently announced that his state would not participate in Race to the Top. What’s the catch?

The situation is reminiscent of another time Democrats stood up to organized labor: in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton backed passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over the objections of the unions. In both cases, the fight between the Democratic party and its union backers dominated the media’s coverage. But then as now, a different and more interesting question preoccupied conservatives: Does the policy in question cede too much local power to a national or transnational authority?

At the heart of the question is a debate over means and ends. Not many conservatives in the 1990s argued, as the unions did, that NAFTA would result in the loss of tens of thousands of American jobs. Nor do many conservatives today side with the teachers unions in support of rules that make it nearly impossible to fire incompetent educators. In each case, mountains of empirical evidence slowly persuaded liberal elites and Democratic reformers to agree at least partially with conservatives that a certain end–free trade and teacher accountability, respectively–was worth pursuing.

This is not to say that Obama has been great, or even good, on education. To the dismay of conservatives and innercity Washington parents, he signed a bill that stripped the District of Columbia’s school-voucher program of its funding. He supports a bill that would effectively nationalize the provision of student loans. And one of his appointments to the Department of Education, Kevin Jennings, founded a group that advocated the inclusion of gay-and-lesbian-themed literature on school reading lists, including books that contain graphic descriptions of sex acts between minors and adults.

For these reasons alone, conservatives would be right to approach any of this administration’s education initiatives with a profound skepticism. But conservative objections to Race to the Top go beyond Obama himself. Many on the right (including NATIONAL REVIEW’s editors) opposed President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act on the grounds that conservatives should fight any bill that entrenches the federal role in education–even if, in theory, it would put the government to work toward laudable ends. Governor Perry reflected this point of view in announcing that Texas would not apply for Race to the Top funds: “Our state and our communities must reserve the right to decide how we educate our children, and not surrender control to the federal bureaucracy.”

Few remember now, but similar sovereignty concerns bedeviled some conservatives when Bill Clinton, in an effort to make NAFTA more palatable to union interests and environmentalists, negotiated side agreements on labor and the environment to placate them. Conservatives worried that these deals would create panels with authority to recommend sanctions and other measures to compel compliance.

Conservatives have legitimate concerns about delegating power over education to the federal government. But state governments have their own flaws, which a little delegated power can mitigate. It’s a delicate balance, and it’s hard to say right now whether Race to the Top tilts too far in the direction of centralized decision-making.

But at least conservatives can take heart that the tide of elite opinion is turning against the teachers unions–and in favor of accountability and choice.

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