Unplugging the Third Rail

According to the Campaign for America's Future, a liberal activist group:

"The plug can't be pulled on the power of the Third Rail"

Essentially they are opposing any attempt to reform Social Security. Unfortunately this seems to be representative of the views of a lot of liberal Democrats who place a greater emphasis on the value of Social Security as a political weapon rather than the value of actually resolving the future problems of the system.

Quote via the Wall Street Journal

Timothy Burger

They Just Don't Get It

Harry Reid just doesn't get it.

The Democrat leader in the Senate seems obsessed with fighting anything President Bush proposes, no matter what ridiculous argument that requires him to make. This is a prime example why the Dems. are going to need to find someone with an elementary grasp of economics to take the helm if they ever plan on connecting with any voter who currently hold a job. Just remember, this is the type of person Dennis Moore takes his marching orders from in Washington.

"Asked Thursday his reaction to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's insistence this week that Social Security must be transformed, preferably along lines urged by Bush, Reid replied:

"I'm not a big Greenspan fan. ... I voted against him two times. I think he's one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington," Reid said on CNN's "Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics."

Reid complained that Greenspan had decried budget deficits when Bill Clinton was president but he doesn't criticize Bush for turning a federal budget surplus he inherited from Clinton into trillions of new debt."

From Knight Ridder online via Drudge Report.


Timothy Burger

Howard Dean in Lawrence

This weekend Democrat Howard Dean was in Lawrence to rally the troops, Dean laid out his vision for the future of the Democrat Party.

click here for the full audio of the speech.

Timothy Burger

Gates: Education is Failing

This is what the world's richest man, who founded the biggest tech company the world has ever seen has to say about the low standards of American high schools:

"Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe," said Gates, whose $27-billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made education one of its priorities"

If our high schools can't graduate students who can excel in college or in high tech work, we are in trouble. If China continues to graduate five times as many engineers and scientists as the US, we are in trouble. The US needs education reform, curriculum reform not just funding reform, or we will be in big trouble.

Timothy Burger

Let Stephanie Know What You Think

State Representative Stephanie Sharp has put out an issues survey that I encourage everyone who reads this page to fill out, you can find it here. The survey is not exactly scientific, in fact a couple of the questions are clearly written to influence the answer, a trick most political science students learn to identify in POLS 110.

Stephanie has been a vocal supporter of higher taxes, in fact she has supported numerous tax increases in her short time in the Kansas Legislature. The rational for most of these tax increases is that Kansas schools don't have enough money so we need a "dedicated" tax increase for schools. Now, if schools don't have enough money to provide a great education for our students then we have to get them the money (money and the quality of learning are two very different things with a weak link between them), but the idea of a "dedicated" tax is laughable just look at Social Security, or look at another example from Kansas.


A few years ago Kansas passed a huge transportation and roads plan. At the time it committed more money to roads than ever before, and it created taxes "dedicated" to transportation a stream of tax revenue just for roads because roads were important to Kansans, to commerce, and to safety.


Stephanie Sharp was one of the politicians who voted to use those "dedicated" tax dollars for general government spending instead. The life of a "dedicated" tax or a "dedicated" tax increase is only as long as voters are "dedicated" to that issue. While the taxes frequently get spent on other programs, they never seem to go away, the issue they were raised for may go away, but the taxes almost always stay. If Kansas raised taxes for education they may go to education for two or three years before some other "critical" issue comes up.


This year the Legislature seems ready to deal with education funding in the middle of the session instead of their typical end of the session, after all the money is spent, routine. Education is the most important thing the Legislature should deal with and they should have dealt with it before anything else, but the middle is better than the end.


The Legislature has come up with a plan that borrows from other revenue streams and cobbles together a plan that provides $100 million plus for education next year. The problem is that they have only identified funding for one year, the following year they have no funding for the plan. What that means is one year of extra services and then a choice between a serious $100 million plus cut to education funding the next year, or a $100 million plus tax increase, neither of which are attractive options.


The Legislature needs to get our schools the money they need to be the best, and they need to stop playing games with our children's educations. The Legislature needs to come up with a real plan for education, with a real plan to pay for it, and they need to do it soon.

Right now millions of Kansas taxpayers pay property taxes that they think go to their schools, they don't. Some of them do, a lot of them get wasted on other programs, what would school funding look like if we dedicated all of our property taxes to schools? I bet we could solve almost all of our funding programs.


If you would like to pass the link on to like minded friends, the survey link is:
www.stephaniesharp.com/survey.html




Timothy Burger