Private Projects Deserve Your Attention....Here's Why

You can take the girl out of politics, but you can't take the politics out of the girl.  Or something like that.  I have almost always been one to focus on local government like school boards and MUD boards, etc..  It should come as no surprise that I served on the local government committee for the local GOP affiliate.  While in service to the Local Government Committee, we were approached by a group of folks to 'pitch' us on the idea of a high speed rail project to run service from Houston to Dallas out of what used to be the Northwest Mall parking lot.  Hmmmm..

I got involved in politics when the first TARP was passed and when Obama got elected.  I had and still have a heart for voter education and protection of the tax payer dollar.  That hasn't changed.  When the folks that were 'for' the project came and presented to our group, I was more than skeptical.  I asked them about seeking a hand out for the government to finance the project and they promised that wouldn't happen.  They said that our state government, aka Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were far too conservative to ever award a bail out.  They didn't mention the feds, however.

I am also not a fan of imminent domain.  Again, the pro-rail folks promised they weren't doing that.  They said they were offering the people who lived in the path of the railway fair market value for their homes.  That may not have been a lie, but now as the news has surfaced that they're looking for a hand out from the feds, they managed to find a workaround in the courts. 

According the article that I linked to above, which was published on KTRH,  the rail people finally got one of their wishes, was to be qualified as a railway so that they could do land grabs.  I stood against the project from the beginning.  My only wish is that we had taken a hard line stance against this as a committee.  Moral of the story is, you can't take your eye off of government.  Not even for a second.

WORLD Magazine: Education Results vs Spending...By The Numbers

Ronald Reagan once said, “If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with. Well, we've discovered that money alone isn't the answer.”    



He couldn't have been more correct.  WORLD Magazine wrote a post they titled By The Numbers. in which they discuss this very issue.  Here are the stats they shared to drive Reagan's quote home:

10.3

"The percentage increase in the number of students in U.S. public schools between 1970 and 2016, according to a September study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The increase was from 45.9 million to 50.6 million."

57

"The percentage increase in the ­number of teachers in U.S. public schools between 1970 and 2016—from about 2 million to 3.17 million—according to the AEI study."

147

"The percentage increase in nonteaching staffers in U.S. public schools between 1970 and 2016—from 1.4 million to 3.3 million—according to AEI."

150

"The percentage increase, adjusted for inflation, in per-pupil spending in U.S. public schools between 1970 and 2016—from $4,934 to $12,220—according to AEI."

And finally,

287

"The reading score for 17-year-old Americans on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2015. This was virtually unchanged from the score of 286 in 1975. Scores on both reading and math have been essentially flat since the early 1970s, despite the more than doubling of spending per student and a sharp increase in the number of teachers per student. A Department of Education report concluded: “Average reading and mathematics achievement for 17-year-olds did not change significantly between the early 1970s and 2012 or between 2008 and 2012.”

So the next time your local school district comes to you with their hand out looking for a billion plus dollar bond, remember this and tell them to go take a hike, and not a tax hike.