More Stimulus Money Wasted by Obama
The president has committed $100 billion in new money to the nation’s public school systems, and required that states accepting the funds promise not to reduce their own k-12 spending. The official argument for this measure is that higher school spending will accelerate U.S. economic growth. But a July 2008 study in the Journal of Policy Sciences finds that, to the authors’ own surprise, higher spending on public schooling is associated with lower subsequent economic growth. Spending more on public schools hurts the U.S. economy.
Ouch! Pretty painful stuff there. It seems it’s not all about school but more about achievement (something our schooling systems are doing less and less of). Read it all here! Obama has to be the biggest pork barrel spending, lobby loving, irresonsible, wasteful spender of all time!
According to your own quote, states cannot REDUCE their K-12 spending. Many schools are facing budget shortfalls and the stimulus is intended, in part, to eliminate the need for them to cut services and lay off teachers. There is also money to make the buildings more energy efficient, which will save money in the long run. That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.
Thanks for stopping by this little blog. Yes, at the face it is surprising. Spending more money on education from avoiding laying off teachers to more efficient buildings would seem like a benefit to the economy.
But it’s not…as it hampers the education of our children and the more we spend on education the lower they achieve. There’s an interesting graph of the problem here. People benefit society as the become productive citizens adding value at the work. Educational achievement means that students have greater knowledge to add value to the work they do. Increasing government spending in education LOWERS student achievement meaning they become less productive citizens.
We are paying schools, teachers, states, etc. more money under Obama to do a worse job. A nicer school building doesn’t mean anything if the students coming out of the plush air conditioned computer game environment know less and produce less. Having additional school teachers with guaranteed employment so they don’t have to even try to teach their kids doesn’t add value to the future productivity of our society.
Therefore, it’s like employing somebody to build a bridge in the middle of a forest where it gets no value (i.e. build a nicer school building) and then paying somebody to come tear down the bridge (i.e. a teacher that doesn’t compete for their job and reduces the achievement of students).
Spending more money isn’t the solution. Another way to think of it is like this. Say your trying to help your economy by selling your house. You pay to paint it black, then you pay to paint it brown, then green, then pink, then blue, everyday you pay somebody to paint it a different color how much value have you added? Depending on the last color if it’s some unpopular color like a barely literate high school student you may have decreased it’s value. And for what? Just because you spent a lot painting the house doesn’t mean anything and the buyer won’t care because you didn’t create value.
Governments never create value. Never have never will. They only erode value. Only individuals create value.
It is telling that so much of the small percentage of “stimulus” money that has actually been spent has been pretty much limited to strong supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign – education, government jobs at all levels and various unions.
All of the “shovel-ready” projects that were supposed to have provided so many immediate jobs are mainly still in the planning stage. We had a few highway maintenance projects here in Maine that were touted as “stimulus funded” (Federal sources being the only source of money available, since Maine government has historically siphoned off revenues supposedly dedicated for this purpose to pay for the excesses generated by its devotion to creating a welfare utopia), but it is highly questionable as to how many “new” jobs were actually created as opposed to temporarily laid-off employees being called back for seasonal purposes.
You are so right; governments do not create value, they exist only through the funds supplied by workers and if not carefully limited will demand more and more to feed the greed and corruption that they engender.
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for the comment. I agree it is very telling how this “stimulus” (read: pork barrel spending) is being used.