Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

New York Post

Eva Moskowitz has become an expert at being hated. It started a few years ago when the “bleeding-heart liberal,” as she describes herself, served on the City Council as chairwoman of the Education Committee. In an excess of public spiritedness, she subjected the contract of the United Federation of Teachers, as well as the contracts of the principals and custodians, to critical scrutiny at public hearings. Her life would never be the same.

Moskowitz still talks of those contracts with outraged astonishment. When she visited schools, she would ask what sounds like a setup for a joke: “Does your custodian change your light bulbs?” The answer: Not quite. They would change the bulbs, but not the ballast — which starts the current in a fluorescent bulb — because that’s not in their contract.

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National Review Online

About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number: Fourteen trillion seconds ago, Greenland was covered by lush and verdant forests, and the Neanderthals had not yet been outwitted and driven into extinction by Homo sapiens sapiens, because we did not yet exist. Big number, 14 trillion, and yet it doesn’t even begin to cover the real indebtedness of American governments at the federal, state, and local levels, because governments don’t count up their liabilities the same way businesses do.

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Today’s corporate profits reflect an income shift into 2010. These profits will tumble next year, preceded most likely by the stock market.

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the nine states without an income tax are growing far faster and attracting more people than are the nine states with the highest income tax rates. People and businesses change the location of income based on incentives.

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Groups that accredit colleges and universities are facing new scrutiny after the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general urged department officials to curtail the authority of the nation’s largest regional oversight group.

The inspector general’s office found that the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite what investigators considered the school’s questionable practices in awarding credit hours to students.

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When does 2 + 2 = 5?

When you’re taking the state math test.

Despite promises that the exams — which determine whether students advance to the next grade — would not be dumbed down this year, students got “partial credit” for wrong answers after failing to correctly add, subtract, multiply and divide. Some got credit for no answer at all.

“They were giving credit for blatantly wrong things,” said an outraged Brooklyn teacher who was among those hired to score the fourth-grade test.

State education officials had vowed to “strengthen” and “increase the rigor” of both the questions and the scoring when about 1.2 million kids in grades 3 to 8 — including 450,000 in New York City — took English exams in April and math exams last month.

But scoring guides obtained by The Post reveal that kids get half-credit or more for showing fragments of work related to the problem — even if they screw up the calculations or leave the answer blank.

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Unions try to block the bankruptcy option.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan recently wrote in these pages that the city may have no choice but to declare bankruptcy in the next few years. Not if government employee unions get their way.

Many California municipalities are going broke because of overspending, especially on public worker pensions. Public safety officers and firefighters routinely retire at the age of 50 and earn 90% of their last year’s salary.

Two years ago, the suburban San Francisco city of Vallejo declared bankruptcy in large part because of its public pension bills. Fifty-eight employees receive annual pensions over $100,000. At the time, …

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The Obama agenda and the Europeanization of America.

Our friends across the Atlantic are fond of saying that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work. According to the data, they are basically right. Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that while the average Italian, for example, enjoys 42 days of vacation per year, the average American has 16.

A predictable corollary: Many Europeans also expect others to work so they can live. The International Social Survey Programme asked Americans and Europeans whether they believe “It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes.” In virtually all of Western Europe more than 50% agree, and in many countries it is much higher—77% in Spain, whose redistributive economy is in shambles. Meanwhile, only 33% of Americans agree with income redistribution.

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Why the National Federation of Independent Business supports the constitutional challenge to the health-insurance mandate.

For decades small business owners have been telling anyone who would listen that they need health-care reforms that lower costs. But President Obama and his allies in Congress pushed through a law that will dramatically raise health-care costs and increase the overall cost of doing business. What’s more, the federal mandate requiring that nearly all U.S. residents carry health insurance by 2014 seriously threatens our basic constitutional rights and individual freedoms.

This is why the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), on behalf of small business owners nationwide, has joined the lawsuit with 20 states mounting a constitutional challenge to this devastating new health-care law.

This law is death by a thousand cuts for small business owners. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the overhaul will cost about $115 billion more than first projected, bringing the total to more than $1 trillion. Small businesses will also now have to deal with an onslaught of new taxes and burdensome paperwork.

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The state won’t be able to meet its June 1 commitments to school districts.

Guess how long it is before the state of New York runs out of cash? Less than a week, according to the state’s comptroller.

On June 1, New York is due to send $3.8 billion in aid to local school districts, including $2.1 billion that was supposed to be paid in March but not sent for lack of funds. Yet New York is still $1 billion short. This could affect school operations, the solvency of any business that sells goods or services to the state, the paychecks of state workers, and ultimately home values.

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The willingness to work for the sake of future prosperity is a universal human quality, but people must believe there is a link between effort and reward.

The euro is beset with fiscal calamities that threaten its downfall, and markets in the U.S. are roiled by uncertainty over the government’s financial regulatory legislation. But don’t worry. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner meets with European finance officials today to discuss the economic situation. According to a Treasury Department statement, they will focus on “measures being taken to restore global confidence and financial stability.” So everything is under control.

Right.

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