thanks for the lowdown on prop 2.5. I saw a bunch of those signs over in the Ryalside section of beverly when I went for a run over there the other day…not in too many other places. I don’t know if citizens of this community are aware that Beverly is cutting most extra-curricular and elective programs such as music and art, and, as is my understanding, a lot of sports, too. Meanwhile, the student population continues to rise. Across the river, Salem is millions in debt.

1. Agree with your antipathy towards racism.

2. Education and criminiality are two completely unrelated subjects. Plenty Madarasa-educated kids grow up to be kill people. What prevents criminality is productive job opportunity. Higher taxation gets in the way of job opportunities.

3. Quality of school is _inversely_ correlated to property tax rate. Look around in Boston area, which towns have the best schools? Newton, Wellesley; they both all have very low tax rates, at 1% or less. In the inner city, Cambridge has the best schools; what’s their property tax rate? less than 1%. Which towns in the state has 3% or higher property tax rate? Worcester; gee, guess what their schools are like?

4. So why is quality of school inversely related to property tax rate? Because quality of school is first and foremost dependent on the students going there and how much care the parents give to the kids; teachers are secondary, and the good ones are attracted to towns with high quailty student body to begin with because then they get to teach instead being wardens watching a day prison. Lower property tax rate attract home buyers. A 1% higher property tax rate means you buy half a house for the town during a life time; at 3% property tax rate, a 30-year mortgage would literally mean that you buy a house for the town by the time you pay off your own mortgage. That’s one of the big reasons why the low-tax towns attract the high income professionals; they’d rather build equity for themselves instead of wasting money on city politicians and their cousin city contractors. The higher property price in low-tax towns in turn keep out the less well-off families. . . that in turn makes for a statisticly better student body. Is that fair to the children born to poor families? Not really, but how many inner city kids born with congenital mental disorder (due to mother’s drug abuse during pregnancy) has your own kid brought home last week? Hopefully the lucky ones who escape the chemical poisoning in-uteral can give their own kids a better chance and that advantage gradually build up over time so someday their own offsprings can move to better towns; at the same time, some of the kids born with silver spoons in their mouths too might succumb to the lures of vices in life and end up going the other way. Trading places is how social mobility works. A great levelling would only lead to more drug-abusing parents instead of responsible ones because their own behavior would have no consequences.

5. Schools, roads and hospitals all existed long before they were paid for with tax money. Private schools, private roads and private hospitals stil exist even today. Public funding detaching the benefitiary from the payer is a big contributing factor to why the cost of schools, roads and medicine have gone up much much faster than inflation, yet their quailty have all plummetted over the last few decades. Do you think I’d use your creditcard more responsibly than you would your own? Did you turn off the heat as diligent when in school dorms as when you are in your own home now and responsible for your own heating bill?

6. What government promises to do during fund rasing has little to do with what it actually does. Would you pay me 10% of your income if I promise you your happiness? If your happiness is not achieved a year later, would you agree to me raising the rate to 15% so I can do more to achieve your happiness? How about 20% the year after that . . . until either you have happiness or I have 100% of your money? It’s quite clearly an absurd con game. Yet that’s how school funding and public services are funded in our society. School is failing? the school deserves more money; the crime rate is up? we must give the police department more money. Wouldn’t there be a built-in incentive for the men and women in charge to let the school and PD fall apart? That’s exactly what happens. The city politicians always give funding to their pet projects first, and the school and PD/FD last . . . precisely because they know they will get more money if school and PD/FD fail. If a restaurant serves up dinners that taste bad and cause food poisoning, would you agree to pay the restaurant more so that they can get fresher ingredient? Few “sweet morons” would fall for that game if a restaurant tries that, yet that’s exactly many men and women fall for when the server puts on the robes of officialdom.

Racism is related to education and taxes thus: if the kids don’t look like yours you may be less willing to pay the taxes that support education.

And if you, Mr. Reality, are so pro-private education, and would prefer to be in charge of your own money, tell me: when was the last time you donated money so a poor child could afford a good private school? I’ll be tyou haven’t funded one scholarship. Honestly few people would. Hence: TAXES are necessary.

And don’t give me that poor people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps crap. Try pulling yourself up, or raising you kids right when you work three jobs and get four hours of sleep every night just to pay for living expenses.

Wow. Where to start.

Newton is a town chock full of multi-millionaires in giant houses. Millionaires don’t have many of the problems of people who, largely through the accident of birth, are born lower on the Social Darwinist fitness scale our society constructs. Education is how they climb up — it’s how minority groups (for instance) gain power where they had none before. Every time wealthy people attack education funding, this fear of being displaced is somewhere at the heart of it — that’s what I believe about human nature, because the poor are not some different biological or emotional entity, somehow “other” than the wealthy.

Teachers are secondary? I’m not going to dignify that with a reply, except to say that there are plenty of apathetic, abusive, and otherwise deficient parents in every social class, and I know lots of people who aren’t wealthy, but who would do anything for their kids, mister.

My other readers should feel free to follow Shorty’s lead, but keep it PG13, and talk about issues — no getting personal, no matter how pissed off you get.

You are projecting your own racism. Being a non-white myself, I’m quite color-blind and equal-opportunity-minded when it comes to almost all issues. Heck, I didn’t even marry a member of my own race. Before your project your own prejudices and parsimony further, yes, I donated to poor kids’ education . . . in fact, fully funded a couple poor kid’s education to go to a private school, even though they are members of a different race of my own, and I don’t even entirely agree with the form of private education that they get there.

Try pulling myself up? Guess what, I did just that over the past two decades decades. My parents made less than $500 a year when I was a teenager 20 years ago; that’s not a typo, they were overseas. I was a full-scholarship student, at a private school!

The last post was from me, Reality; not sure why the post said “Shorty said:”

Mike,

Yes, Newton has a few blue-blood folks. However, I don’t know if you have ever lived or looked for housing in Newton. It’s become a very diverse town over the past decade. In fact, one of the neighborhoods in Newton where I looked for a place a few years ago was majority non-white! Education is only a minor influence on upward mobility; a far more important one is economic opportunity. Goosing education with taxation that kills the economy, you end up with our current situation: an America that is far less upward mobile than 100 years ago, and graduating students are loaded with enormous amount of debt that they have little chance of payback with sparse job opportunities.

“Teachers are secondary? I’m not going to dignify that with a reply” Because you can’t possibly come up with a logical rebuttal to that. My wife used to be a public school teacher, and we witnessed exactly what a life as a day prison warden was like. Of course there are irresponsible parents in upscale neighborhoods, and responsible parents in poor neighborhoods . . . just like there are responsible teenage drivers and DUI 40-yr olds. That’s why driving records are kept individually instead of collectively. Don’t you think the different parental influences make a huge difference in their kids’ lives?

“I know lots of people who aren’t wealthy, but who would do anything for their kids, mister.” Sounds like my own parents, and the parents of kids to whom I donated. If you think about it, should that be an argument for privatising education? So responsible parents can focus their resources on education instead of having to buy an expensive house in a differnt town to get it? And that irresponsible parents who happen to be born with a silver spoon in their mouths suffer the consequences of their irresponsibleness instead of getting a free ride because they inherited a house in a nice town from their parents??

BTW, nobody seems to have dared to take on the most critical piece of info in my original post: quality of schools is inversely related to the property tax rate. Yet, those supposedly want higher quality education want to raise taxes; sounds like “I know I’m correct; don’t confuse me with facts!” LOL

Aw, come on! Do you know what losing $250 per year per household is going to do to my neighbors and I? To the town’s economy? NOTHING. But it will mean enough money to fund a public school system that will pay all of us when we sell.

I think you’re blind to how offensive your treatment of teachers is; I know real, dedicated teachers who don’t think of the kids in their care as prisoners! They work to keep them off of drugs and on a successful life path, just like parents. And they do it for peanuts. And blaming kids for their parents’ mistakes is irrational. You live in a society — and one that has, apparently, taken good care of you and yours.

I come from Pittsburgh, PA — Mass. doesn’t know what lack of economic opportunity is compared to the rust belt. Education is a HUGE part of this state’s relative success, and relative insulation from the real terrors of this recession — free, public education, just as our founding fathers intended.

To put all of it in perspective, we spent twice the projected bailout figure for American public schools in the first 90 days of the Iraq war. That’s where your economic opportunity went. ENRON and the multiple stock market crashes — that’s where your economic growth went. Blaming teachers is underhanded.

Calling Shorty a racist is way off base — whether or not you are or are not white does not erase centuries of race, class, and gender discrimination, and it is that discrimination she’s pointing to. Don’t take things said on anonymous blog comment pages too personally!

Fun fact: In the first public schools in Britain, children were taught reading, arithmetic, trades skills, and physical education. Social theorists argued against teaching writing because it might lead to “radicalism.”

I’ll agree with you on one thing — student loans really screwed me, too!

But I have a college education and a job where the physical stress and exposure to chemicals won’t kill me, the way it did my grandfather. I didn’t have financial aid, or scholarships, and now I’m saddled with debt — but none of it eclipses the fact that I am a professional with a career instead of a guy being worked to death by a corporation. Not everyone is lucky enough to have what I have, but I’ve been through enough to appreciate it.

Oh — the inverse thing. If your have a town that is worth 100 million dollars, and a town that is worth 1 million dollars, and they tax at the same rate, the less valuable town makes 100 times LESS money, even though it may have to spend more on schools because of the number of households relative to the size of the district. The price of building maintenance, and just about everything else, isn’t THAT variable (even when teacher salaries are doubled in the wealthier town), but the wealthier community has a huge surplus, and the poorer community a dearth. It has nothing whatsoever to do with economic opportunity. Trickle down economics doesn’t work; it just concentrates wealth and creates poverty.

Mike,

“that will pay all of us when we sell” means socking it to the responsible parents moving from less well-off neighborhoods in search for better education for their kids Frankly, I’m the one riding moral high horse here in comparison to such opportunism. The unfortunate reality facing that kind of opportunism is that higher tax rates correlate to worse education and lower property value. Worcester did not get to their 3.1% overnight either. Overtime, one bit at a time, the tax rate was raised to that level, with corresponding exodus of responsible and self-sufficient families, and collapsing school system and property value, every step of the way.

When parents have an attitude that school teachers are primarily or even solely responsible for their kids, instead of thinking in terms of parents themselves being the primary and school/teacher only secondary influence, you indeed will end up with a day prison system. My wife was a very consciencious and responsible teacher when she was in the public school system. She showed up for work early, and stayed 3 hours after school is out at 3:30 almost every single school day. Teachers however do not work in a vacuum. When parents get mad when there their kids get detention for egregious behavior in class, pick bones with the school and teachers whenever there is disciplinary action against their kids, and school administration plays politics in the mode of “see nothing wrong, hear nothing wrong,” you know you are in a prison system. That’s why teachers usually shop for good school districts, where they can teach instead of getting mired in the prison politics.

I do not support Iraq war or the current bank bailouts; wasting resources on other programs not justified by existing wastes. Two wrongs do not make a right. Stock market crash is the natural consequence of previous malinvestment; the cleasing process liquidate previous excess. Government intervention to prop up markets would only lead to new malinvestment . . . just like Greenspan’s attempt to prop up the stock market produced a giant housing bubble instead, eventually resulting in more pain like we have today.

Modern American public education was actually copied from Germany, the Prussian model. Go read the writings of public education advocates of the 1870’s-1890’s. The common curriculum was a statist tool to brainwash kids, and prepare them for service to the state. We all know what the efficient Prussian education system eventually produced, two world wars, to be exact.

School selling education is just like any other vendor: monopoly makes for inefficiency. Higher price paid to a monopolist does not equate to better service or product. You experienced the student loan fiasco first-hand. Government loan gauratees only led to exhorbitant price of higher education that far outpaced inflation rate. The banks profit from the process because they get to collect interest on higher pricipals. Bankers’ profit on student loans are also guaranteed by taxpayer subsidy and bankrutptcy exclusion. Meanwhile, the schools get to enjoy the financial banaza and brain wash the kids into believing how important big government and big banks are to the economy, preping them for the next big bank bailout. That’s how a fascist state works economicly: government intervention (use of violence and threat there of; i.e. taxation and inflation) to support the monopolists and screw the little guys.

Mike,

There is just one problem with you 100 million vs. 1 million argument: Boston, Quincy and Worcester are the three largest cities/towns in MA, not Newton, Wellesley, or Weston. Towns like Newton, Wellesley and Weston actually have a very high per centage of school age children . . . because many parents game the system by buying houses there during their kids’ school-age years, and sell afterwwards.

In any case, when this suburb thing got started back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, all those suburb towns had very little resources compared to the big cities. Yet, somehow the self-selection process produced the virtuous cycles in those relatively small towns. Like I said before, school quality is first and foremost determined by the student body and their parents; good teachers and good students have a tendency (of course not exclusive) to be attracted to good schools. That’s why it’s important to emphasize parental responsibility; parents need to know that their efforts count! Throwing a bunch of public money at schools would only serve to dilute the impact of parental contribution and channel that money to wasteful spending. It’s just like throwing a bunch of public money at innercities or at the Iraq hell-hole is not going to bring prosperity in either place. The money is guaranteed to be siphoned off by politically well-connected players. The locals will become opportunisitic in the political game instead of being entreprenurial themselves for their own good.

Again, we’re talking about $250 per household. Peanuts, for the single greatest determiner of success for most people.

You’re warping the model — the fact is, the TAX BASE is high and the population lives in private homes instead of apartment buildings. So, abandon the inner city — there’s no hope for THOSE people, right? Gross, buddy.

If people who went to college — the inhabitants of these suburbs you vaunt — are better parents, then we should be helping as many people as possible go to college. That requires strong public education. Your way would leave us with gated communities surrounded by something that would look like Glasgow in the 1960s.

So it isn’t racism, it’s classism — Social Darwinist tripe of the Neo-Liberal (closest to Fascist) variety. Can’t pay? You’re “trash.” Your society isn’t responsible for you. Why won’t you just die out, survival of the fittest style?

It isn’t like the British system was any better than the Prussian model — in fact, Susan Griffin’s essay “Our Secret” is an interesting look at that systemk and the way Nazi cultural attitudes have always been part Western value systems (like the Chicago 1911 Ugly Laws — look that one up!).

I’d love to get certain things out of school — prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, history books that tell half-truths, Algebra (I freekin’ hated math) — but I won’t budge on a kid’s right to a well-funded, supportive school.

Would you pay me $250 if I promise you your own happiness? If you don’t achieve happiness in the next month, can I raise the tax to $500? after all, it’s only $250, peanuts, right? What makes anyone think that $250 is going to make things better instead of worse?

College graduates do have higher income than non-college graduates; however that’s like saying A students make more money than D students. There is no study proving that the same caliber students getting A’s, would be better off going to college than if the same student had taken up a trade early on without taking on the studepndous student loan debt. How much of your undergraduate education are you using on daily basis now? I’m not using any of mine, and I had one of the best educations money could buy, at least according US News and World Report. Given today’s student debt level and how obsolete the material they teach at undergrad level they have become, and how much grade/diploma inflation has taken place, it’s quite probable that a $45k a year undergrad education doesn’t pay at all even in the long run.

What I propose is not classism at all. On the contrary, your theme that “so we can sell our houses for more” to relatively poor parents desperate seeking better education for their kids does seem a little classist . . . as in each town would be in a different class. In fact, since house is heritable property, if you believe education is of paramount importance to a person’s development, then tying education to housing is the very mechanism through which hereditory wealth and previlege is to be perpetuated.

Education doesn’t have to be expensive, not until the government got into it anyway. There has been charitable education for the poor since time immemorial. Broad-based taxation to support education is a new phenomenom created in the late 19th century, supported primarily two political forces: (1) the merchant and manufacturing businesses that wanted the public to fund their employee training; (2) the collectivist politicians who wanted uniforminty in thoughts. By the mid-20th century, the bankers also got in the game because there is risk-free interest profit to be made, both on student loans and school constructions.

Nazism is not just about the elimination of people on the edges. It’s economic collectivism that has the state run the economy to benefit monopolists. The inevitable economic hardship from such government mismangement will inevitably lead to social darwinistic elimination attempts. As the pie gets smaller, many people would look to the neighboring slice in order to preserve how much pie they get for themselves and their own family. That’s why it’s critically important that the greesy hand of the government doesn’t get in the way of economic opportunities. $250 per family may sound like much, but keep in mind, the so-called economic stimulatin check is only $600.

Last sentence should have been:

$250 per family may NOT sound like much, but keep in mind, the so-called economic stimulatin check is only $600.

Missing the important negation “not.”

Ok Reality, 2 things.

1. Where are you getting your stats for the inverse relationship between property taxes and school quality?

2. As for your monopoly argument, schools are an altruistic endeavor, and thus the free market fails for them. The free market only rewards self-interested behavior. This is one reason why Adam Smith, the daddy of capitalism, stipulated that capitalists should not run the government. Remember teachers can get jobs elsewhere. “Punishing” a school district by removing funding is annoying and often sad for teachers, but not necessarily the financial lever you might think it is.

P. S. Way to go on donating money to kids for education by the way, but seriously, how many people do you know who are willing to do that?

There hasn’t been broad-based education for the poor for time immemorial. It’s a relatively recent invention of increasingly more enlightened societies.

I was raised with a value system that says that hogging the pie is wrong.

Being pro-advancement is not the same as being classist. Buying a home and providing for your future isn’t greed. Consigning entire socioeconomic groups to illiteracy and wage slavery is.

“1. Where are you getting your stats for the inverse relationship between property taxes and school quality?”

Town tax table and school test rankings. You are more than welcome to verify the numbers yourself. The typical top public school towns all have residential property tax at around 1%; some even lower. Whereas all the high property tax towns at 2-3%, all have crappy schools.

“As for your monopoly argument, schools are an altruistic endeavor, and thus the free market fails for them.”

I don’t think many teachers work for free. Principals often make close to six-digit salaries. District superintendent usually in the quarter million to half million range. Just because some one works for “non-profit” doesn’t mean they don’t have personal interests. That’s why competition is critical for efficiency.

I’m not aware of the quote that you attributed to Adam Smith. Government is a framework for legalizing the use of violence by a select elite. If your point is that people with self-interest shouldn’t run government, I actually agree to a degree; in other words, nearly nobody should run the government at all, and the government should be deprived of most of its powers lest such powers be abused. Remember, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“P. S. Way to go on donating money to kids for education by the way, but seriously, how many people do you know who are willing to do that?”

Thank you for your compliment. I don’t think I’m especially generous . . . seeing that myself enjoyed the benefit of private donation for education when I was in school. Many private schools are some of the most well-endowed institutions in this country. If government doesn’t get in the way by taxation and driving prices sky high, private charity will be more effective. In fact, even as we speak, many private colleges are putting together programs of 100% free education for kids whose parents make less than $100k a year. It’s not just a publicity stunt. Alum donations kept colleges alive and prosperous for nearly 300 years before the mid-20th century government programs. Was Harvard’s and Standford’s initial founding acts of altruism? perhaps to a degree. They were also results of personal ego. It’s better the egotistic buy good names with their own money than us taxpayers getting robbed blind at gun point to fulfill some politicians’ big ego, not to mention their friends’ wallets.

Mike,

Education for the poor has been in place for a long time. Mandatory public education on the other hand is an integral part of state brainwashing, carried to an even more thorough degree in totalitarian states. I wouldn’t call that progress.

Hogging the pie is of course wrong, worse still is stealing from other people’s slices.

“Buying a home and providing for your future isn’t greed.”

Huh? Is that some kind of realtor “new-speak”? Speculation and hoping a bigger foool to buy you out and provide for your future is certainly greed.

” Consigning entire socioeconomic groups to illiteracy and wage slavery is.”

So are you for public food? public housing? publicly paid computer ownership? and publicly paid car ownership? Because, apparently, you don’t see people being able to acquire any of thing through private means. While only communists and their fellow travellors would call employment relationship wage slavery, the taking of service or goods of value through the use of violence (and threat thereof) on a routine basis without compensation voluntarily agreed to by the owner is actual slavery/servitude; taxation fits that description quite well.

BTW, on the topic of wage slavery, wage is actually determined by the supply qualified applicants vs. the demand from job openings. The lower the demand due to high taxation, the lower the wage level. The higher the number of qualified applicants, also the lower the wage level. That’s why from the very beginning, mandatory public education was supported by the merchant and manufacturing interests of the late 19th century, so they could bill the cost of training their employees to the public.

Considering what’s been happening in the public school system nation-wide in the past few decades, I wouldn’t trumpet literacy as an achievement of public education either. There are plenty illiterate high school graduates around. Average state college graduates are less knowledgeable than high school graduates 60 years ago, and their pay rate reflect that, on purchasing power parity basis.

I’m going to recap my original argument, and get on with my life.

In my community, given its resources, we could have outstanding schools. That costs money. I don’t mind spending my money on it because I care about my fellow human beings, and because my property taxes essentially buy me the community I live in. Yes, my house is an investment, just as yours is probably a magnificent tax shelter. I’d like to see more people buying and building wealth, and any money I put into my community — improving the roads, the schools, emergency response, parks, libraries, senior care, free food programs, and other evil schemes like that — is money well spent, because it makes my house more that much more desirable at the point in my life where I decide between a managed care condo and a cell to die in.

Sorry to leave you way up there, Shorty — thanks for getting my back. mm

I sold my house in 2005, cashed out, so to speak, and have been renting a large single family house ever since, for a tiny fraction of what a mortgage on the same house would be, anticipating house pricing going back to normal. I wouldn’t buy a house for the sake of tax sheltering; what’s the point of getting 30 cents back for every dollar tossed away in interest payment? Besides, the alternative minimum tax kicks in and preclude much of the mortgage interest deduction anyway.

Don’t even bother with the grandstanding. I’m pretty sure I donate far more than the typical generous-with-other-people’s-money type do. When was the last time you voluntarily donated over $5000 to anything in a single calendar year? There is absolutely nothing preventing you from donating to any of the causes that you mentioned with your own money, but have you done any of it? Instead, you want to be generous with other people’s money. In other words, you want to rob other people at gun point and pretend that you are generous. Before the advant of intrusive government in the mid-20th century, such coercive “generosity” was typical of the mafias organizations.