The GOP Texas Primary in 2014 Just Got Fun
You know how Grover Norquist and the NRA threaten to “primary” Republicans who don’t walk lockstep with their wacko far right unAmerican idiotic hurtful and damn stinkin’ mean goals?
Well, Texas just got lucky. Republicans here are facing the same threats but from a different group: the people who want to make money off education.
The same group of people who used to sell used cars want to go into the education business – building private schools. They used to roll back the speedometer and now they want to roll back arithmetic and reading.
When you think school vouchers, visualize dollar signs going into the pocket of some guy in a plaid sports coat and a belly hanging over his belt.
Texas held back school vouchers this year, thanks to some level-headed GOP support.
GOP heavy hitters in the House joined in the 103-43 bipartisan vote for the budget amendment, saying money appropriated to the Texas Education Agency may not be used for school vouchers or tax-credit scholarships.
The GOP support came from rural Republicans who know full well that vouchers will be the death of Texas rural education. Nobody seeing dollar signs wants to set up shop in a town with one school and a graduating class of 45 seniors. So, those public schools will suffer greatly under big business education.
So, it comes down to Republicans threatening to primary each other. The rightwingers are going to primary those who voted against vouchers and the rural Republicans will ban together to primary those who did.
Democrats? Well, we’re just pickin’ and grinnin’.
Sweet!
1I’ve never understood why more people don’t worry about the school voucher scam and the effect upon education. It’s ready-made for the con artists: as with financial planning, people know it’s important but most don’t have the skill set or the time to closely monitor performance. Trouble with a capital T which rhymes with P, and that spells Pool (of money, to be raided.)
Plus, it gives Republicans a weapon against teachers unions, and a bone to throw to the anti-evolution put-God-back-in-school crowd. Plus, it gives the rich a tax cut by subsidizing their private schools. For Republicans seeking to destroy the middle class and bring us back to a Gilded Age government, what’s not to like?
2Ya know Juanita Jean, Every time you mention Texas and Education in the same sentence, I have visions of the name “Bush” floating in the air next to dollar signs. Between Neil, Jeb and whatshisname, Barb spawned the Triumvirate of Evil towards Public Education. Texas and Florida were the test states and, as we all know now, anything touched by a Bush withers and dies.
3Texas is n ot the only state falling for this scam. How I wish Kansas rural Republicans were as smart as those in Texas. For once, I think Texas is the hopeful star – I just hope it truly is not the Lone Star in repulsing vouchers.
4And it is running thru FL and IN like a polluted river. IN is #1 in the Nation, with the most kids on the voucher program- and of course Mike Pence- the male Michele Bachmann, has vowed to expand it!
5Rick Scott went from scamming Medicare to scamming education.
Thieves in designer suits..
Just spent the weekend reading about my husband’s old home town’s history. It seems that schools back then were built by the people who would use them on land usually donated by the same people and they would also maintain them, pay the teacher and house the teacher! They had to scramble through private libraries to get enough books at a certain reading level for each grade but they made it! Each family was responsible for making sure their kid had at least a pencil and some paper which was an upgrade from a slate and chalk. These schools grew into the public schools now in session in that area but here’s the kicker. Those parents wouldn’t have accepted a voucher. That meant they would be somehow beholden to somebody else. And those schools actually turned out some really great people from judges, lawyers, doctors and what’ll. Salt of the earth and definitely deep! And they figure it was cuz they were all part of it and really gave a damn be increasing the curriculum every year until they had A level schools. Hear that? Increasing the curriculum. Not cutting back in any way.
6Privatizing education will give us a system essentially identical to private health care, with bloated costs and executive compensation, cherry-picking “customers” to cover only the easy-to-care-for ones, and no concern for actual outcomes.
7Right on RepubAnon! Vouchers are the way to destroy public education, break teachers’ unions and make a whole lot of money for the corporations which own them. They are not subject to the same standards as public schools and have little or no oversight academically or financially. Look for more and more scandals in the headlines. Republicans flock to these schemes like flies to meat. The public schools need this money to meet ever-increasing needs of special-needs students,
8poverty and parental neglect. The teachers are heroes who dig into their own pockets to subsidize their schools’ deficiencies, all the while being castigated by the likes of Scott Walker for wanting a living wage.
Another worm that was unleased to destroy the public school system in Texas was the “highly qualified teacher” rule. Anyone with a Bachelor’s degree who can pass “a test” can be certified as a “highly qualified teacher.” The first and second wave of these new “teachers” has passed through the system. Most stayed between six weeks and three years. The work was too hard, the challenges too great, and the support was non existent. Of course, the majority of these “teachers” were hired in poorer school districts where the kids were already suffering from educational neglect. Again, this ploy was a way to keep Teachers from organizing and standing up for themselves. While I have some compassion for the teachers;my heart aches for the students in the classes of the “highly qualified.”
9Well, there goes LynnN again.
Do you understand what the word “private” means? We haven’t had a private health care system for well over 50 years. Oh, there might be private companies involved, but that doesn’t make it private.
But let’s carry that a little further.
Say we privatize the schools. Right now, public schools have an incredible problem of administrative bloat. Education spending has increased massively since the 1970s while outcomes have remained flat. Twenty-five states have as much as double the number of administrators as they do actual teachers.
Why is that? Well, economists, particularly of the Public Choice school of economics, will tell you that this is a peculiar symptom of being public; that is, when a system is controlled, managed, financed through political means, it tends to be corrupted by politics. Politicians who promise jobs will create jobs out of nothing and put them to work shuffling papers in the school system.
Would this happen under a private system? A truly private system, with private LOSSES as well as private gains?
Back to health care. When the laws have separated the consumers of health care from the producers of it, when supply has been legislatively amputated from demand, and there are hundreds of thousands of laws, regulations, codes, and other details designed not by the producers or the consumers, but by nosy third parties, to regulate the interactions between producers and consumers, what makes you think that is even REMOTELY private?
Calling our system, pre-Obamacare, private, betrays a staggering level of ignorance of how it all really works.
If anything, your point confirms my thesis. We have highly salaried bureaucrats running the schools. The costs have ballooned many multiples the growth in the number of students. And there has been NO regard for outcomes as seen in…actual outcomes!
If this is true in health care, it’s because it is anything but private; rather it is highly regimented, bureaucratized, centralized, and regulated, and resembles NOTHING like a private system, where costs and results are both transparent.
10“ever-increasing needs of special-needs students,
poverty and parental neglect.”
Someone else said this.
I wonder if this isn’t a product of the progressive program. The progressive believes in collectivism. The progressive believes that we can do things better when we do them as a community.
I think of that MSNBC ad that’s making the rounds. The one that says that children are collectively owned.
Let me talk about something else that gets done better as a community.
Stonings.
Why were stonings always performed as a public event where everyone participates? The reason is that, and psychological research bears this out, is that people can act as mob to do things they never would do as individuals because as a member of a mob, they are absolved of any guilt, but they get to enjoy the benefit of the action.
No one stone thrower can be identified as the one who killed the stoning victim. But every single one of them benefits from the execution.
It’s a classic case of individual gains, dispersed costs.
When the responsibility for something is put on an abstraction like “community,” the individuals that make it up don’t feel individually responsible for exerting more effort than anyone else. In fact, over time, each individual will tend to lower their contribution to the group effort because they don’t want to be the one fool putting in more than he’s getting. Everyone gradually puts in less and less. But each individual expects to use the full measure of their share of the benefit.
This is the problem of collectivism, and any kind of group effort.
So, over time, what have we done in society? What has progressivism tried to do? It has always been the enemy of individualism. It has collectivized child care, parenting, and everything else we’ve always expected individuals to do because that’s the only way they can be accountable.
Precisely. Progressivism exchanges individual accountability for group accountability. And in so doing, individual effort diminishes. Parental neglect is a perfect example of this. Why should parents put in more effort? There are social programs, social workers. There are schools to feed the kids during school, and there are schools to feed them when school is out. The only thing parents really have to put any effort into is the breeding part.
This is what collectivism and progressivism do. It’s why every time it has been tried – and yes, it has been tried multiple times throughout history – it was a devastating failure. And the bigger the scale, the longer it took to recover from it.
11Brian, citation please about your claims re: the healthcare system.
The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Congressional Budget Office both agree that Medicare has lower administrative costs than private medical insurers. Additionally, Medicare has no profit incentive to deny coverage to their customers. Lastly, most people on Medicare report being satisfied with their coverage in surveys, unlike consumers left to fend for themselves in the medical insurance world.
12“ever-increasing needs of special-needs students,
poverty and parental neglect.”
Someone else said this.
I wonder if this isn’t a product of the progressive program.
———————————————————
I wonder if this isn’t a product of less access to healthcare and greater economic disparity in America.
13Roxy, what do you mean when you say “administrative costs”?
Well, let’s save time. I’ll just go ahead and list some. A company’s administrative costs might include accounting, account management, collections. Insurance companies invest unused funds. Researching the best investments, paying investment managers, those might be more. Insurance companies generally occupy a building of some kind. Those buildings need to be built. They need to be maintained. People need to secure them. Building management. What else? Who mows the lawns? Who interacts with political authorities?
Of course those are all administrative costs. But are those absent in Medicare? And if they aren’t, are they merely hidden?
Well, Medicare doesn’t manage its own buildings. The GSA does that. Medicare doesn’t do its own collections. The IRS does that. Medicare doesn’t manage its investments. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Dept do that. Medicare doesn’t mow its own laws. GSA, again. Medicare does political interaction, but those guys are in different government agencies.
In fact, when you INCORPORATE all those administrative costs associated with Medicare that are outsourced and financed through other agencies of the government, that are hidden from view because they are administered in other government buildings, Medicare actually looks MUCH WORSE than private insurers.
Besides, it doesn’t even make sense. “Administrative costs” don’t generate any returns. They are mere costs. If insurance companies were motivated solely by profit, unlike your noble Medicare employees (I doubt many folks who work there work for monk’s rations…), then why would they throw money into things that generate no profit? Your very premise is self-contradictory.
14How about we just end the discussion and go directly to a single payer system for everybody in this country . . . . medical , dental, visual, etc. All under one umbrella like Thailand or Switzerland or Japan or even the much-maligned Canada. Every doctor I see is fed up with the current healthcare system in this country and most of them tell me that they would be delighted with a single payer delivery system that would allow them to treat their patients in a system that operates with teamwork, a prevention emphasis, supportive care for chronic illness, and would treat patients as whole people instead of dividing them up into parts. That would please me greatly because maybe I could get the dental care that I cannot afford because our dentists have been smart and cunning enough to avoid becoming part of the insurance governed system of care. They can charge what they want and there is no provision for people like me and many other, especially elderly, citizens who live on fixed incomes and cannot afford dental surgery.
15It might also open up the field for integrative medicine and allow some nutritional education and treatment methods to become standard practice in American medicine. Perhaps acupuncture could be allowed and maybe people with peripheral neuropathies NOT caused by diabetes could be treated with the same care as the diabetics. Or maybe not. But at least the best treatments would no longer be rationed as they are now and handed out to those who can pay the most.
I am not a republican, a democrat, an independent, a socialist or any other label anyone wants to slap on me where this is concerned. I am a retired American citizen who is on a fixed ( pension plus social security ) income and is having to do without medical care and dental care because Medicare does not cover my needs and neither does any supplement or advantage plan, and I am not independently wealthy enough to pay those costs.
Oh, and by the way, it really does take a village to raise ( and educate ) a child, and here in my community all of us are dedicated to making our elementary school ( with 18 languages represented there ) the very best it can possibly be ! And each one of us is working to outdo all the others in the amount of work we do for our neighborhoods and one another. Only a real fool would be concerned as to whether or not he is doing “more than his share”. People like that don’t last long in our group.
Brian,
Again…cite your sources.
I have reliable information regarding the costs for Medicare from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Congressional Budget Office.
Regardless of whether or not the employees are fat, mean and ugly, the numbers are what they are. Insurance companies have higher admin costs than Medicare.
Your example of a building is a good one. Have you seen the corporate HQ of Aetna? United Healthcare? Cigna? Blue Cross/Blue Shield? I guarantee you will not mistake them for government facilities.
16Brian, you also omitted the executive bonuses from your administrative costs.
I fired up the google machine and the second article that popped up was about Cigna’s CEO earning $1Million in salary for 2010 along with $9Million (rounded down) in bonus. That does not include his $8Million (rounded down) in stock options.
I’m sure Mr. Cordani has since received a nice cost-of-living increase
or
a generous separation package to cushion the blow of losing his job in such a poor economy.
17