State of the Union by Carl Moore
- May 22, 2009
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Speed Bump by Dave Coverly
Stone Soup by Jan EliotAbout State of the Union
State of the Union is the result of a self-professed "fallen liberal’s" journey from radical socialism to conversative cartooning. Combining startling caricatures with a sly sense of humor and a sharp eye for satire, this innovative new strip will be sure to tickle your funnybone while making you think.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate - All Rights Reserved.
Comments (35) Jump to Comments Form
johnnydoc5 said, 6 months ago
Hi Satipera,
FLS, heaven, or ground where I lay because there is no afterlife, forbid we displease the teacher’s union.
I have an idea, let’s pay them more as test scores drop lower faster, because that is where the tax dollars go.
wndrwrthg
said,
6 months ago
Let teachers teach and not prep kids to score high on tests. Lets pay teachers what they pay congressmen and vice versa. Remember little georgies “no child left behind”, like all his proposals, it’s intent was the opposite of it’s name.
johnnydoc5 said, 6 months ago
I will give you a point Wndrwrthg, but let’s tweak it. Let’s pay the teachers instead of the congressmen.
wndrwrthg
said,
6 months ago
johnnydoc5,
DEAL! And while we’re at it lets increase the armed forces pay and medical benefits to congressional levels.
sablebrush5 said, 6 months ago
Public schools were effective and produced well-educated kids back in the ’50s. Today they are lousy. Why? Because of teachers unions and the monopolizing of education by the status-quo education establishment. Like all monopolies, over time, the quality of their work goes down until, like today, it hits a bottom calle “lousy.”
Teachers unions are good for teachers, not students. It is almost impossible to fire a bad teacher these days. And there are a lot of bad teachers.
Vouchers, an idea promoted by the great Milton Friedman, are simply a tool that allows parents to choose where their kids will go to school. It is a way to introduce competition into the education business. A parent, given let’s say a $7,000 voucher by the state government, can choose to send their kid to a public school, a private school, a Catholic school or any kind of school.
What would happen under such a scheme? Parents, being parents, will send their kid to the best school they can. Good schools would flourish, bad schools would slowly disappear, and so would bad teachers because any school that kept on board a mediocre faculty would go out of business. This is the business model of an education system and, like a competitive business environment weeds out lousy businesses, so a competitive education environment would weed out the lousy schools.
But, of course, teachers unions oppose this for obvious reasons - they’re afraid of losing their jobs. And sure enough, a great number of them would lose their jobs because a great number of them are lousy.
How many mediocre teachers did you have in public school? I had a few great teachers, several pretty good teachers, and too many - way too many -lousy ones.
Tabour said, 6 months ago
satipera said,
least desirable pupils ( and the least profitable ) are left to the state sector
Incompetent teachers remaining in their post is part of the problem
So the answer is to get all students to have equally poor education?.
gbrucewilson said, 6 months ago
People, This is very simple. Rich kids get the best education. Why? Their parents pay more taxes and demand good schools for their money. Vouchers would allow poor people to send their kids to the same schools as the rich. Rich people wouldn’t get vouchers because their kids are already in good schools. If public schools in poor areas were so good, Obama would be sending his girls to the DC public schools. His opposition to vouchers is clearly part of the socialist (union) plan to dumb-down the masses and pull everyone down to the lowest denominator. Under socialism, the only ones excluded are the “elite”, which of course includes the ones making the laws. It is scary that we are losing our freedom and loving every minute of it. WAKE UP! Before it is too late.
LibrarianInTraining said, 6 months ago
Unions started out in this country as a great idea. But with all their negotiating, they seem to have worked themselves out of a job. I understand wanting to get fair wages. But they cross the line sometimes. When they had special skills and limited workers, that was one thing. But when half a million people can do the same job and are willing to do it for less?
I’m pro-union (my father is union) but I’m also torn because I don’t think it works anymore. I think maybe they’ve just screwed themselves into a hole.
BirishB said, 6 months ago
Its really quite simple folks …
All that money that goes into school vouchers is picked out of the school budget. That means that the money spent sending kids to private schools with public school money DOES NOT get spent in that public school. Public school being … wait for it … PUBLIC (I know, shocker, right?) must be equitable. Having a public school system pay for private voucher for some is a clear violation of the rights of those who do not get them. You cannot justify using public money in a way that creates a system of haves and have-nots.
When Obama repealed the school voucher system in DC, he was making a commitment to the principle of equality in education. He was also making sure that DC was spending its budget where it ought to. That … is government in action.
BTW – you all should seek out info on the real expenditures in school budgets. It is really quite shocking and repulsive, and, in fact, the money spent on paying teachers is just a fraction of a school’s regular budget. The union argument is a red herring.
Bonus … federal commitments to No Child Left Behind left a $35 billion shortfall. Who pays for that shortfall? States. The same states that are now in budget crisis. And who suffers? Children. And let’s not get into the fact that the mandate was anti-Federalist and potentially unconstitutional because it mandated local spending at the federal level. No Child Left Behind leaves everyone behind … but instead of admitting failure, elected officials and crappy cartoonists make the argument about teacher’s unions instead.
BirishB said, 6 months ago
I’ll say this, too:
The “anti teacher union” argument blames the very people who work each day to educate our children. Teaching is a time-honored profession and those that follow that calling deserve and should demand more dignity than to be made the villain of some political sandbox debate. Blaming teachers for the state of poor education is akin to blaming our soldiers on the front line for not getting the job done in the Middle East; it is akin to blaming doctors and healthcare workers for the high cost of medicine. By blaming teachers, you ignore the institutional problems and you ignore that a-holes in Washington have made political fodder of our educational system – we ought to have our children’s best interest in mind, and instead we lump blame on those trying to make a difference? That is just beyond comprehension to me.
Ph00ey said, 6 months ago
Vouchers were invented as an excuse to subsidize rich folks that send their kids to private schools.
BirishB said, 6 months ago
so, Freebird, your saying that “cap and trade” makes a new expense for CO2 producing companies, and that companies will pass the expense on to consumers, and that THAT is a tax?
You couldn’t be further from the truth. More to the point, what would you have government do? Hope that private industry polices itself? Not going to happen; CO2 control costs money, and private industry answering to investors will not willfully spend extra to produce fewer emissions when they don’t see a profit in it.
Government spurs change by speaking to private industry’s bottom line. In this case, government seeks to lower emissions. How else but by regulating the amount of emissions should or can government take action?
In fact, your entire summation is yet another argument ad absurdum, a red herring, a misstatement of relevant facts, a slippery slope fallacy, and agenda-laced propaganda: your playing a shell game with the truth and working the facts to make a case that “big bad government wants to take over CO2-producing industries.” Making it about “taxes” when it is not merely broadens its appeal, but it is intellectually dishonest.
It is difficult to believe that “cap and trade” is an elaborate end-around by government to take over private industry. There are way too many moving parts for that to happen. Occam’s razor applies here: you are making way too many assumptions. And so does Sigmeund Freud: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes government is just trying to reduce CO2 emissions.
Herbabee said, 6 months ago
“For all your liberals her”
BZZZT! ZAP! That does not compute…. That does not compute….
~CANCEL~
freebird77 said, 6 months ago
For all your liberals here is another $3,100 tax increase from your democrats in office and Obama
Just What Is Cap-And-Trade?
Essentially, cap-and-trade is being deceptively peddled as a system to encourage businesses to engage in “environmentally responsible activities.”
Under cap-and-trade, the government would issue “pollution credits.” Once allocated (as the government sees fit) those who use less than their government-imposed allocation of pollution credits can sell them to those who have exceeded their government-imposed allocation of pollution credits.
Peter Ferrara, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, writing for The American Spectator explains cap-and-trade this way:
“Under this policy, every business involving CO2 emissions will have to buy permits from the government for the amount of such emissions, which will be sold in open auctions, where the permit price will be bid up. But the government will limit the number of these permits, and consequently the maximum amount of CO2 emissions allowed. Indeed, over time the government will clamp down on the amount of CO2 emissions allowed by the permits, with the emissions to be reduced by 80 percent by 2050.”
And how will cap-and-trade policies change your standard of living for the worse:
Ferrara explains:
“These increased costs are effectively a new tax on the American people, even though Obama promised in his campaign that there would be no tax increase for the bottom 95 percent of income earners.”
Of course, in the strictest sense, cap-and-trade is not solely a “tax.” It’s something much worse.
When the government taxes you, it openly confiscates your income and that income goes directly into government coffers to fund some actual or perceived need.
Under cap-and-trade, no one in the government reaches directly into your pocket. Instead, our government, which is already taking de-facto control of the banking and automotive industry, will have yet another tool in its arsenal to effectively take control of every other company or sector of industry that produces CO2… and that’s just about everybody.
The fact that you may be forced to make radical adjustments in your lifestyle and the fact that more money will come out of your pocket in the process is, for the extreme Left, a beneficial side-effect… sauce for the goose.
In short, cap-and-trade has nothing to do with the environment, it is just one more way for those in government to pick your pocket (or even better, coerce someone else into picking your pocket), steal your liberty, regulate your behavior and diminish your standard of living in this already queasy economy.
johnnydoc5 said, 6 months ago
Hey BirishB, how did your response to Freebird get in front of his statement???
A more relevant question: Perhaps you, BirishB or Satipera, should elaborate how vouchers split between haves and have nots, and lets assume I do not know anything about vouchers, so be specific.
JmcaRice said, 6 months ago
The left is pro-choice except when it comes to education. They want there to be only one choice: the NEA/AFT mandated one-size-fits-all union-monopoly of all public schools. Pity the poor children who have no alternative.
jmworacle said, 6 months ago
Isn;t it amazing that the biggest supporters of public education send their children to private school. There are several factors to why public schools are failing.
The teachers unions are more concerned about protecting less than adequate teachers.
Lack of discipline in schools. At a class reunion I was speaking to one of my classmates who at the time was a hiigh school principal. I asked him: “When calling a student on the carpet do you think back to when we were in school?” He answered: “Yeah, but the parents do support us they our parents support the school.” “Bubba” Bussey from the “Rick and Bubba” show was relating on how his mother was a teacher for thirty years remarked that when the parents were questioning “Why are you picking on my child?” instead of “What seems to be the problem and how can we solve it.” She knew it was time to retire.
Funding or the supposed lack of. The United States spends more per capita on education than any industrialized country. What needs to be done is to do an extreme audit and what doesn’t help education needs to be cut. When you have sports team flying to other parts of the country to play against another school tell me how does this benifit education?
Parents. Show me an under-performing student and I will show you parents who don’t care.
Cirriculum. Not everyone is college material. What is wrong about teaching a student a viable trade?
As for vouchers, in Washington D.C. the voucher program was able educate a student and half of the cost of what the Public Schools were doing.
Paudil said, 6 months ago
I think a big part of the problem in public schools today is that teacher’s can’t use corporal punishment. Therefore, they don’t get respect. If the kids don’t respect the teachers, they won’t learn.
jack75287 said, 6 months ago
Thank you sablebrush5 some facts of American Education system are:
What FarLeft will not bring up is why is home voucher a threat to the public education system.
1 We spend more then India and China combined on education.
2 We spend more then Japan and England per student Combined on education.
Then Farleft recites from a system that wants the voucher program shut down across the country. Listen the teacher Union could not pass there own test when I was a kid. So our teachers were trained by people who could not teach themselves. What is wrong with this?
BirishB said, 6 months ago
johnnydoc …
“School A” gets a budget. Then “School A” gets a mandate to pay for some kids to go to private schools. “School A” takes money from its budget to pay for said vouchers. “School A” now has proportionally less money to spend on the kids still in their school system. “School A” is now paying for disparate educational opportunities – tuition for children attending private school takes away from spending on education for kids still in the system. Inherently, you are penalizing the children in the system.
When you are talking about budgets that include tax dollars, you cannot create a system that created disparate educational opportunities; you cannot allow spending that gives an “advantage” to some but not all – you’re using public money to fund disparity. The public school system in many parts of the country is broken enough and desperately underfunded enough without having to be saddled with the debt of paying for kids that don’t even attend their system.
I think some people get caught up in the absolute numbers in school funding, but don’t know how that money is spent. We may spend more than China, India, Japan and England per student, but we spend it unwisely. And school vouchers only ensure that we don’t meet the fiduciary responsibilities of our educational needs.
BirishB said, 6 months ago
oracle …
You bring up a lot of valid points. I only wish you would have put parents higher on that list. I know many teachers who leave the profession because they tire of dealing with parents. I would argue that many of the the discipline problems in the classroom could be solved at home.
A question about the voucher system in DC: What if that money were spend entirely in the public school system AND efforts were made to address how that money is spent? Do you think that spending on school vouchers is a band-aid on a broken bone, that it merely presents an out for failing systems rather than enacting true, positive change that would benefit all and not some?
johnnydoc5 said, 6 months ago
OK, thanks Birish, that was enlightening, but now I bring up question two: what is the money going to then?
Yukoneric said, 6 months ago
Unions are no GOOOOOOOD. Been there done that. Wasted money on dues that I could have put to better use elsewhere!
BirishB said, 6 months ago
johhnydoc …
Here’s a NJ example: if a kid gets tossed from a public school, they are put in a school called The Yale Academy (designed for disciplinary cases) at $35,000/year. The school they were tossed from pays for that. Now, let’s say the kid gets arrested and is incarcerated, the school still has to pay for the kid’s slot … they are legally obligated to pay for that kids slot at Yale Academy for an entire year, and I believe they must pay to keep that kid’s slot open for his entire HS range … its a four-year commitment.
Another one: the Vineland, NJ, school system has the second largest bus fleet in NJ, second only to NJ Transit. Roughly 200 buses, operating 150 days a year, 10 miles to the gallon … bus upkeep, fuel costs, driver salaries, buses driving kids to sporting events, overtime for extra drivers to sporting events, etc. Even a back of the envelope calculation tells you that the costs of getting kids to school is astronomical (think millions).
More? Litigation. I’ve heard horror stories. Here’s one: parent sues school to get her kid a hearing aide because she has no insurance. Why? Because she claims its an educational need. The lawsuit is baseless, but the school still must retain counsel to fight that and a litany of other bogus claims. The litigation (and additional costs) surrounding designing special ed is astounding as well.
IMO the worst expenditures can be found in the bloated salaries of arrogant and out-of-touch school board members/executives. These people are paid six-figure salaries and can’t figure out what to do with themselves or how to fix the problems.
Its all shame. And maybe a sham. We’re cutting music programs even though music education leads to higher math scores; we’re cutting sports programs and wonder why kids are out on the streets; we’re cutting after school programs even though parents need them to be able to work to support their families. And I think its a shame that all these cuts are being made because there is virtually no transparency in school budgeting.
attyush said, 6 months ago
Veni, Vidi, Vondrous (I came, I saw, I couldn’t believe my eyes)
The comments today are actually relevant to the strip.
johnnydoc5 said, 6 months ago
I see, thank you again, Birish. So really what is going on here is that there so many bureaucratic regulations to get through that the schools have precious little left for themselves and actual worthwhile programs. And, in my experience it does in part come back to the unions, because the school board here is made up of members from the teachers’ union. However, this is a smaller part of the big problem.
IMO, politicians shouldn’t be paid, but should be volunteers. There is way too much money being wasted in the middle of many otherwise fine programs.
jmworacle said, 6 months ago
BritishB, thank-you for your response. I did not list my points in order of importance but you are correct involved parents is the most important factor. My point about the voucher system is this, if a business has to compete to stay in business they will go to the proper means necessary to be successful. If you have a monoply, they feel they can coast.
mytinytown said, 6 months ago
farleftside
Tell the truth now, Democrats hate vouchers because it might allow students to get taught in NON-public school. Allow the students to develop their very own train of though. Not one pushed by some liberal idiot teacher.
Why should the school get money for a kid that is in the school district, but not going to school at that school?
You liberals do not make sense.
BTW I do despise the new gocomics message board. Did not take the reply advice or the numbering advice. Took the same system and made it ugly and harder to use.
As well I have been away do to HDD issues and stupid slow India Dell tech support. The issues with Norton Ghost putting my HDD back together.
jack75287 said, 6 months ago
gbrucewilson
I don’t know about a deliberate attempt to dumb everyone down but I do think your post was very smart. The problem is everybody is thinking me first. People want social services. Politicians want to keep there crummy jobs so they are happy to give them. It is greed and not greed from the political right that is moving the country at this time. It is greed that leads current political power base to use a book like Rules for Radicals that teach to insult your opponent.
————————-
It is greed that leads the teacher’s union to stop teaching and keep producing less qualified instructors. California has nearly 10 percent of there so called educators not showing up everyday.
————————–
It is evil to love they way you want things to be more then the way things are. The sad thing is the people who do this will never get what they want, it will always be something else.
jack75287 said, 6 months ago
jack75287 said, about 4 hours ago
Thank you sablebrush5 some facts of American Education system are:
What FarLeft will not bring up is why is home voucher a threat to the public education system.
1 We spend more then India and China combined on education.
2 We spend more then Japan and England per student Combined on education.
Then Farleft recites from a system that wants the voucher program shut down across the country. Listen the teacher Union could not pass there own test when I was a kid. So our teachers were trained by people who could not teach themselves. What is wrong with this
main point being there is plenty of money for education. Sorry I missed the most important line.
jack75287 said, 6 months ago
gbrucewilson
I don’t know about a deliberate attempt to dumb everyone down but I do think your post was very smart. The problem is everybody is thinking me first. People want social services. Politicians want to keep there crummy jobs so they are happy to give them. It is greed and not greed from the political right that is moving the country at this time. It is greed that leads current political power base to use a book like Rules for Radicals that teach to insult your opponent.
————————-
It is greed that leads the teacher’s union to stop teaching and keep producing less qualified instructors. California has nearly 10 percent of there so called educators not showing up everyday.
———————
It is evil to love they way you want to live more then the way things are. The said thing is the people who do this will never get what they want, it will always be something else.
jack75287 said, 6 months ago
attyush your are right people have learned how to debate.
sablebrush5 said, 6 months ago
jmworacle is right. The monopoly of education that public schools enjoy is the problem. Without competition, they become more and more bureaucratically sclerotic, regulated, over-managed, and a burden to both teachers and students.
I know a teacher who gets handouts from the school system on how to wash her hands, how to serve milk at lunch, who she can touch and who she can’t, etc. This is insane, but an understandable consequence of bloated bureaucracy. All monopolies produce larger and larger bureaucracies and bureaucracies produce more and more rules and regulations that simply make teachers jobs more difficult and time-wasting.
A successful voucher-type school system already exists in this country if we care to see it. It’s called the American university system.
American universities are among the finest in the world, yet our high schools and grade schools are not. Why? Our universities exist in an atmosphere of competition for parent and student education dollars. The better the school, the more students want to go there. The worse it is, the fewer, and eventually, if a bad university or college doesn’t produce, funding dries up and it goes out of existence. It is competition that keeps universities on their toes.
Another fundamental difference is that attendance at universities is voluntary. Everyone who is there, wants to be there. Students are not forced to go there. Making school mandatory ensures that our high schools and grade schools are populated with at least some students who don’t want to be there. These “discipline problem” students cause all kinds of trouble. Forcing them every day to be in classrooms causing trouble makes no sense. They should be expelled, and were, back in more sensible times.
I know, I know, you’re about to say we can’t have uneducated kids wandering the streets in an ever-more technilogically sophisticated society. Well guess what? That’s exactly what we now have.
NoFearPup
said,
6 months ago
Mark Trail, I’m not for vouchers but I agree that the humanist anti-religious, etc crowd is so against anyone looking into what they consider one of their sacred cows; that they will burst into fits of hysteria if you proffer up something different to consider… I agree with others that the voucher program is just a way for Insincere Repugnicrats to muddy up the Federal waters. I believe education should be another issue left entirely to local and state governments. Or the Fed should loosen their requirements. The idea that a group of self-serving bureaucrats and elitists can be trusted to design curriculuum and dole out federal monies without being accountable to the American people is a joke. And no fed money should be used as extortion for compliance with these wishes. Either the money is necessary; or it isn’t.
Ron
said,
6 months ago
The voucher program in Massachusetts has been a huge success. So much so, that the teachers unions are fighting it much harder here than in DC.
After all, its DC - nothing works in DC including congress and the President, except to steal tax payer money.
Perish the thought that a common family’s children should get an education equal to a rich family’s children.
My goodness! Kennedy and Obama children might have to mix with commoners!