Governor Patterson wants to cut the education budget and this is causing problems with the legislature.  They don’t want to fight one of the most powerful unions in the state.  Here is a union that donates money and time during elections and a big one is coming up next year.  The incumbent assemblymen and senators would much rather have them happy than angry.  The question is always about money. 

It shouldn’t be about money.  New York spends more money per pupil than any other state, so there should be enough to produce a majority of well-educated students.  It is evident that the educational system isn’t doing a proper job, so it isn’t the amount of money being spent, but rather the money isn’t being spent in a proper fashion.  Perhaps we should go back to basics and define what should be the priorities. 

This is an opinion column, and this is my opinion.  We should first define the purpose of schools and the education structure.  At the focal point, we should place the student.  The total purpose is to educate children.  Sounds simple, but the system makes it complex.  Next important on the list are the teachers.  Good teachers are necessary for good education, and this is a statement that can’t be debated. 

The third element is a place to teach and requires schools and proper equipment.  Last on the list of necessities is administration.  We should have competent administration, but in the present scheme of things, we are spending too much on administration and too little on teaching.  We have too many in the Ivory Tower which takes away from the prime objective which is teaching children.

How can this be fixed?  Here is this columnist’s opinion.  First start in Albany and reduce the Department of Education by half.  There are too many people making bad decisions.  Remember the “new math?”  That gave us a generation of people who can’t make change for a twenty-dollar bill and in addition, they get very confused if you ask them questions about geography or American history.  A significant number still have problems with grammar and sentence construction. 

I have yet to bring up this subject to a legislator and had one justify the size of the bureaucracy in Albany, and in the individual schools.  As far as the individual schools are concerned, there are too many little kingdoms and too many school superintendents.  That is too expensive.  In a previous column, we compared the responsibilities of a school superintendent and our County Clerk and Sheriff.  Our elected officials get a salary of $79,600, which would be a laughable offer to even a principal.  I challenge any school official to make a case that their job should pay more than the sheriff or county clerk.

Next comes the important teachers who are the first line in the education process.  A good teacher is worth his or her weight in gold, but the system pays on the seniority system rather than by ability.  The two fairest means of compensation in a free economy are commission and piecework.  The one who does the most or best gets the greatest reward.  The question is how do we compensate the best teachers and this will be addressed in a future column.  However, we have seen that “quality education” based on paying teachers more, has not increased the ability of more students to graduate or achieve higher academic levels.

Then, there is the question of  what happens when taxpayers don’t pass school budgets.  Where are the cuts and who suffers from them?  Easy!  The students suffer most, then the teachers because the administration will cut programs like athletics, art, music and electives and will lay off teachers and give the survivors larger classes to teach. The bussing of students to the school can also be affected.  We don’t remember any time a budget wasn’t passed that resulted in administrative posts being cut.  The cafeteria personnel can be eliminated, but secretaries stay employed.

A future column will also discuss consolidation and the elimination of tenure for public school employees.  This is a wonderful program for teachers and administrators, but is a pure negative for taxpayers and gives no benefit to pupils.  This will be a very controversial subject.  Stay tuned.

No man’s life or property is safe when the legislature is in session.  Governor Patterson has called the legislature into session to close the budget deficit that they caused with their irresponsible actions of the past.  The tax and spend and the borrow and spend mentality of the governors and legislators of past and recent years have finally caught up with them.  The state (and taxpayers) are in deep trouble, but with the ignorance of the NY voters (most of them don’t vote) the legislators believe they can dance their way around this problem.

They still haven’t come to grips with the obvious solution, which is to cut spending.  The most logical cuts will affect and offend the special interests that are very helpful to their reelection.  Therefore, they have to be careful not to disturb the status quo.

To his credit, Governor Patterson is proposing cuts to education.  Oh, oh!  That would offend the teacher’s unions and cause big problems for the assemblymen and senators who rely on the unions for money that goes for campaign contributions.  But that is a logical place to cut a truly bloated bureaucracy.

The average cost per pupil nation wide is $9,138 per pupil.  In New York it is $14,884.  For that much money we should expect that the students are the best educated in the world.  Like the song says: “It ain’t necessarily so.”  Except for some of the best suburban schools, the results are dismal.  In Buffalo, half the children who go through this expensive educational system don’t graduate.

Many of those who do, are not prepared properly for college or even for decent jobs.  Yet, the unions believe we must spend even more money for “quality education.” The quality just doesn’t seem to be there.  We heard this slogan for the past generation and those in the educational field do well income-wise, but we have yet to see any real improvement in getting better-educated children.  The taxpayers and not getting much of a bang for their buck.

The second area that could be cut is Medicaid.  New York spends $2,293 per person for Medicaid.  The next highest state, Rhode Island, spends $1,659.  We do not get reports from Rhode Island that people are turned away from hospitals or are dying in the streets because of inadequate medical care.

What we know is that there is a lot of fraud in the system and New York bureaucrats have either been indifferent or incompetent when it comes to correcting Medicaid abuse.  These are two of the top spending items in the state budget.

Another big expense is funding bureaucracies.  These are important to the politicians because that is where the patronage lies, and we know patronage is the life blood of political parties.  That is why we are in the deep trouble now.

When the Democrats and Republicans choose candidates to run for office, the prime considerations are

1. Name recognition,
2. Ability to raise money, and
3. A political base to get help and votes.

Competence to solve problems isn’t a factor.

In fact, the dumb ones who can generate votes are the best ones to represent their party because they will do what “leadership” tells them to do.  The smart ones can cause dissention to party leaders.  We do have some of each in the legislature.  All the Speaker and Majority Leader needs is a simple majority, and the party survives and thrives.

Nothing is going to change until the voters change, and that is not likely to happen.  The majority of those who can change the system will sit home on election day and gripe about taxes, corruption and the high cost of living.  As long as their favorite sports team is winning, they are reasonably happy.

Perhaps, in Erie County, with a rotten football team, and a bad losing season, the apathetic may actually get mad enough to vote in 2010.  Getting the apathetic motivated is a tough job.  Maybe the impending disasters in the country, state and football field will be the catalyst for positive action.  We blame politicians, but it is really the citizens who vote them in office who are at fault.

Last week was a very disappointing election, not because of who got elected, but the disgrace that three out of four people who were eligible to vote, didn’t.  This is a disgrace and an affront to democracy.  To have almost three-quarters of our citizens stay home instead of doing the right thing and going to the polls is an abomination against a free society.

I think of our forefathers who suffered at places like Valley Forge and died facing superior armed troops.  American history is filled with the sacrifices of brave men and women who fought for the rights and privileges we enjoy today.  It is like spitting in their faces when the idiots and irresponsible citizens refuse to pull their weight by doing a simple thing, like voting, to make those sacrifices worthwhile.

Voting is a right and a privilege, but more to the point, it is an obligation.  We have become a society of too many selfish people who want something for nothing.  The “what’s in it for me” syndrome had ruled the lives of the majority.  This is going to ruin America in short order.

Some people vote because they are responsible and it is the right thing to do.  Others vote because they want the benefits of a government that supports them.  As several prominent people have agreed in the past, when the minority can force the majority to pay for non-production, the free society will end.

How much of a minority is 25 percent?  That means thirteen percent can put people in office.  They vote for politicians that will give them money and benefits that take from the productive and give to the non-productive.  We have proof that the “soak the rich” philosophy has a big downside.  In New York we watch as the high-earning people and those who have the potential for earning a good income, are leaving the state in droves.  Few new businesses are entering or starting in this business-hostile state.

What keeps the population somewhat stable is the influx of people who migrate from other states (and countries) to New York to come on the dole.  It is easy to get welfare in the Empire State.  Granted, some really are in poverty because of external causes.  We need a safety net for the young, the aging and the disabled, but there are many who take advantage of the system.

Buffalo is the third poorest city in the nation.  There are reasons for this.  First, the St. Lawrence Seaway virtually eliminated Buffalo as a port and we lost the grain mills.  At one time Buffalo had the two largest flourmills in the country.  Now, they are gone along with the jobs they created.  The same goes for the steel industry and several large manufacturing plants.  Good businesses made for good employment opportunities.

The second problem Buffalo has is the liberals who wanted to “improve” education and forced integration by cross bussing.  The result was that the schools are more segregated than before and the quality of education dropped to a point where only about half of the students who start school graduate. The money being spent on bus passes could have been used to improve the school buildings and equipment.  More money down the drain!

The third big mistake was the subway to nowhere.  Instead of spending the money to improve infrastructure, hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted to build a trolley system that has proved to be ineffective to give Buffalo a viable downtown.

OK, so what does that have to do with a poor voting turnout?  Simple! Over the years, too few people bothered to insist on candidates who were competent and had a proper vision.  We had the untalented put into office by the indifferent not doing what was right.  They didn’t insist on better representation in the federal, state and local governments.

The strings were pulled by a relatively few power brokers and those who voted did not vote well.  We are getting the government we deserve.  I will call those who were able to vote, but didn’t, and those who refuse to get involved with the political process, idiots.  Think about it.  Our present government is due to the idiots in our society.  What a shame.

Whatever happened to common sense?  Seems to be totally lost in government, especially in New York.  The major problem at present is focused on the deficit.  That is where the common sense argument has its biggest example.  If the fools in the legislature and the governor had not been obsessed with runaway spending, we would not have been in this predicament.

In my lifetime, in my opinion, the two worst governors were Nelson Rockefeller and George Pataki.  Nelson Rockefeller put a powerful engine on the spending train.  He created “authorities” that were entities that had the power to borrow money that was not in the state budget books.  They really didn’t have to answer to the legislature or the people. They became supreme bureaucracies with little accountability and they served Rocky well to fund what he called “moral obligations.”

It opened the door extremely wide for a succession of Democrats to spend more, create more programs and to greatly increase taxes.  New York rose quickly to the top echelon of “highest total taxes” in the country.  The practice was to spend and tax.

Governor Mario Cuomo was a master of this practice and he made it evolve into a fine art.  The budgets just kept growing and the taxes kept rising.  New Yorkers looked for a new direction.  They voted him out and put in George Pataki.

Talk about getting out of the frying pan and jumping into the fire!  Pataki did cut taxes, but he made up the difference to balance the budget by borrowing which is one of the big issues facing the state today.  From tax and spend, he took it to borrow and spend.

I don’t remember him proposing a budget that didn’t exceed the rate of inflation and he put in his share of new programs.  Cuts were something that he thought were used in a meat market.  The debt kept growing and the interest on the debt kept rising.  Eventually, like someone who lives off credit cards, there comes a time when the cards are maxed out and it is payback time.  This time is now.

Spitzer made many promises of reform and he became governor.  His promises were as reliable as his marriage vows.  He didn’t keep either. He also chose a Lieutenant Governor who was a figurehead to appease a voting block.  When Spitzer resigned in disgrace, Patterson was ill prepared for the job that he inherited.  Lieutenant Governors and Vice Presidents are usually used to attend functions that the chief executive wants to avoid.

Patterson did that well, but is totally incompetent to be a leader of the state. He gets little respect from those who are legislators and the public who expect more from a governor.  This is a perfect example of the Peter Principle, and the New York taxpayers are suffering and will continue to suffer.

Common sense tells us that in order to balance a budget, the first place to look is for ways to cut spending.  Patterson’s first budget increased spending and also increased taxes.  This is a bad way to go. He increased the taxes on the rich and greatly increased fees on services that the middle class uses.  This hurt everyone who pays taxes. This is evident by the fact that the rich are moving out of state and there is a general trend of job hunters doing the same.  Those who want to go on welfare are filling the gaps.

Now, he says he has to make cuts during the middle of the fiscal year and wants to cut aid to schools among others.  We agree that the schools are too expensive, but nothing was done in his or previous administrations to make schools more efficient.

Government by panic is not a good way to run a state and it appears that panic is the prime motivator in the coming year.  Future columns will offer some common sense suggestions to close the gap.  A big motivator will be the fact that the legislature will have to face the voters next year.  We will see how well they dance to a difficult tune.