I live in New Jersey. That about says it all and explains some of my bitterness. The other cause of my bitterness is the sometimes irrational belief that right makes might. Some of the top politicians have been indicted, convicted and imprisoned since the Federal Prosecutor began investigating what should have been internally investigated by the Department of Law and Public Safety, thank-you madam Attorney General and all your predecessors.

Aside from the criminal activities of some elected politicians we have the honor of having the highest automobile insurance rates, and our politicians make having it mandatory. We also have the some of the highest property taxes in the nation. The biggest reason for the property taxes is that schools are funded by property taxes. So if you do not own a home and have a dozen kids the village pays your way with our taxes. When the elderly, on fixed incomes, can no longer afford the taxes it makes no difference to the school board, the State or Department of Education. The amazing thing is that the funding levels are based on a flawed study done by a well meaning educator that saw low scores in urban centers and high scores in suburban areas. By the way each area has its own school board, superintendent and budget regardless of the fact that there are any schools or students in the location. The educator published his findings in a book and showed that money is the predictor of success in education. The reason, he speculated, that inner city children did not do well in testing and successfully completing high school is because the richer areas within the counties paid more per student. Since inner city property is not valued as highly as suburban areas the balance had to made up by state funding. So if a rich area raised the per capita cost of educating a student the now called Abbot District received a windfall increase in funding to match the suburbs. The cost per student is now near the $17,000.00 mark per student. So now we go into a dead mans spiral. The well meaning folks in the suburbs want the best for their children and regularly approve school budgets without even thinking about it. This automatically gives the same raise to the inner city school boards. The trick is that Abbott Districts were defined by some formula but now the surrounding municipalities have been included in the formulas and dispersing of monies. The surrounding areas are called Costello Districts. Funny, Abbott and Costello Districts, until you get your tax bill. So along with parents that think every school should have all the amenities possible we now have to educate the children of illegal immigrants at the same $17,000.00 level. This gets more and more hilarious when you find the educator conscientiously examined his findings ten years after and found the Abbott Districts have not improved. On any given day over 50% of the students are truant and almost 50% of the teachers are not in that day. He wrote another book and found that what was the better predictor of a student’s success is not money but parental concern. No one wants to look at this with the same fervor as the money spending model. Money is the easy answer, drain the tax payer. Parental behavior is unenforceable. So even though the study and reality show that money does not help we continually override the voters finally voting against school board budgets. It would seem the Hillary Clinton’s scientific paper expounding that it takes a village to raise a child does nothing more than make an excuse to continue throwing money down a rat hole with no end in site. Someone told me to be careful about my tax philosophy. They accuse me of thinking too much like a Republican and irrationally stop all taxes. This is actually far from my philosophy. I see the need for the future to filled with happy, educated adults, with two car garages and all the latest electronic gadgets, but lets face it working at McDonalds is never going to pay for these things. We will end up as a backwater country to be used as a lesson in stupidity. By trying to bring everyone up to the same level you are supposed to raise the lowest to the highest, not lower the highest to the lowest. Continuing to drain the populace will lead to losing the best and brightest.

Someone has got to make the decision to measure the value we are getting for the dollar. If the programs are not working then cut them lose as fast as possible and try something else. This not only goes for education, but the war on drugs is an abysmal failure, and the war on poverty is leading to total capitulation. Raise the white flag in surrender because the current crop of candidates to lead this country into the future all has the same mentality. We are marching along and the end game is being narrowed down to accepting absolute dictatorship, total anarchy, or a total revolt that puts government back into the role defined by the original constitution and out of the role of social engineering.