I'm going to try to toe the line between the rational and the emotional in this thread, which may be tough since this affects my very personally.

As you may have heard, many states have big budget deficits. Oregon is one of them. As a result of that, the Portland Public Schools is facing a $29 million budget gap for next school year. A potential bond measure may be passed to borrow $20 million, but of course, that would require a tax of 35 bucks or whatever for the average taxpayer, so even in liberal Portland that may not pass. If the bond measure doesn't pass, around 400 Poartland Public Schools teachers will be layed off. Even if it does, there will still need to be around 100 layoffs.

Their alternative education budget will be slashed as well. Of the 20 private alternative schools PPS contracted with this year, only 13 will have their contracts renewed. The school I've worked at for the last 7 years is, unfortunately, one of the 7 whose contacts won't be renewed. After 27 years of working with PPS, in which they offered a second or third opportunity to students who struggled with or were expelled from public schools, our school will close down. Everyone I work with will be out of work. And we'll be facing a job market where dozens of other teachers from every school district will be layed off.

This is not meant to be a pity thread. But I do want to put a personal face on some of these concepts we throw around here, and that I hear thrown around in the media all the time. This is one thing that "cutting budgets" means. It means me, Stu, Joe, is losing his job because of these budget cuts. And I'll be one of those leaches taking unemployment payments for a long time because I'll probably have big trouble finding a job in my field right now. Same with hundreds of other teachers in Oregon.

Kill the welfare state right? But yet, $1trillion added to the national debt over the last ten years in order to fight two meaningless wars is OK. And it's OK to keep doing it some more.

You may say that it's overly simplistic and unfair of me to imply me and all my co-workers losing our jobs is so connected to a war across the world, but it's hard for me not to see it that way from my chair right now.

Yeah, trying to figure out what to say in this thread is tough since there are those here that have a very negative view of the jobless, and even more so of those using unemployment. I lost my job due to economy-induced downsizing along with a few other people at my company almost a year ago and haven't had any luck. From talking to reps/hiring managers either on the phone or at career fairs, I've found that pretty much no one in my industry in the entire northeast and some of the south is looking to hire. I've only scored two interviews out of around 160 places that I've talked to, one for a position in a potential new office that was never opened, and another for an actual position that the company decided to change their minds about and not fill.

On another similar note, my mom is a teacher for the Syracuse City school district and finds herself in a similar predicament as yourself.

I tend to focus more of my ire on the mega-rich, and those that want to cut taxes for those groups of people, but yeah, things suck.

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Proud LGBTQQ Individual

And you're right that I'm probably not focusing my ire in the right place. Really it's the tax cutting of the past 25 years, especially the W. Bush years (eliminating the dividend tax, cutting taxes for all), and the deregulation of financial markets that has been taking place since Reagan and lead to the sub-prime crisis that are more immediately responsible for most states' budget holes.

Yet still, no one is talking about cutting military spending. Instead the rightwing-controlled military focuses on public employee unions. People want to strip unions of collective bargaining rights. It's incredibly stupid. Public employee unions are NOT WHAT'S BANKRUPTING THIS COUNTRY. It's a fucking drop in the bucket. And they're just trying to hold onto the life they have now which in many cases allows them to barely squeak by. I work at a private school, and we're all non-union. Maybe if I was a member of a public union, I'd have a job next year.

This country is fucking insane.

The US was at its peak when 1 in 3 working adults were union members. Just saying...

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Oh, dont worry about it dude, they figured out what's costing us all that money and they solved the problem, didnt you hear? Planned parenthood and the EPA, yeah, turns out it's all those abortions and environmental protections which are bankrupting us. Who'd a thunk it.

Exactly. Was also when the effects of BIG GOVERNMENT were at their strongest. It wasn't just WWII that caused the American economic miracle. It was also because of GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS like the New Deal and the GI Bill. Policies that focused on the actual well-being of the people, not just "stimulating the economy" (i.e. big business)

why don't the US raise the taxes? higher tax - yearly income >1 million $

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HOCKEY IS BACK!

Because according to the Republicans, that's "unamerican socialism". And everyone hates tax raises here because they don't understand what taxes pay for or how a balance sheet works.

But you're right, that's exactly what should happen IMO.

Local, state and Federal governments have been spending into the red for over a decades.
Obviously the answer is to give them more money.

FFS

Go ahead, raise taxes, that doesn't solve the problem.

The problem is entitlement spending (including public pensions).
This fiscal year, 45% of the Los Angeles City budget is going to pay for public pensions.

45% of all tax revenue.

45%

And this Republican crap about only cutting discretionary spending is bullshit...the Military, Social security and Medicare/Medicaid all have to get the axe if anyone wants to put on their big boy pants and actually try to fix this instead of just getting elected again by partisan supporters feeding off demagoguery like so many zombies feasting on brains.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Oh and Stuuuuu...that thing about public pensions not being the problem?

Moody's is now treating pension liability like Bond debt when considering credit ratings...guess which state sucks the hardest?
Yours.


http://publicceo.com/index.php/local-go ... -bond-debt

But we definitely should't look at pensions...nope, nothing to see there.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

and I just want to say I'm not being a partisan asshole, there is NO easy way out of this mess.
People are going to get screwed, taxes are going to get raised, things we love will have to go away.

It is what it is. The economy took a shit and our collective governments weren't at all prepared, so now we have structured debt we simply can't pay.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

http://oregoncapitolnews.com/blog/tag/pension/

definitely not pensions

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Yeah, this is going to be one ugly mess. Saying that this is due to one administration's wars or some such is laughable. This country has not spent within its means at any level of government for far, far too long. People are going to be hurt. There's no way around it. Either tough choices are going to be made, or the whole system comes crashing down.

I often look at it like a family budget. And it makes sense to me, because before I lost my job due to the economy, my family didn't run off of a budget. We just spent what we wanted and tried to somehow make it work in a general sense.

Say that your family budget is in the red. You lost your job or whatever, and you can't make all your payments. Saying, "we're not in this mess because of the money we spend on steak every week," does not make continuing to buy steak a good idea. Just because a greater emphasis should be put on things like rent, utilities, mortgage, car payments, interest payments, etc. doesn't mean that those smaller cuts are meaningless. When the shit hits the fan, you've got to get medieval on that budget. Yeah, you might sell your home and rent a smaller apartment. Sell one family car and carpool to work. But you don't go on buying steak while you do that.

Spending money on cowboy poetry festivals (or feel free to insert your own pet project) should not be in the realm of the government during these tough times. In fact, it shouldn't ever be in the realm of the government. Make the cuts to discretionary spending that you can, then get serious and tackle the entitlements. But the status quo will only lead to drowning in debt that will crush the economy. If steps aren't taken to get this country on track fiscally, I see a default on the horizon, and that, my friends, is bad juju.

Raising taxes is only going to depress the economy. If you took every cent the rich had in taxes, you still couldn't pay for all the spending. Stop demagouging and realize that revenue is not the issue. Spending is.

Ham

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Do you believe yet?

My unsolicited opinion is that every post in this thread so far is pretty much correct (gotta love this place!). I’ll summarize.

-We in the US do not take care of our teachers properly
-We have a greedy, selfish, overly simplistic perception of taxes
-Entitlements are out of control (especially based on our current tax “strategy”)
-Things were much better before we got into this “don’t want to pay taxes, don’t want to stop spending” mentality
-We should be taxing the wealthy and large corporations more than we are
-Things will probably never be as good as they once were

This isn’t either party’s fault. It’s both of their faults. Because both parties have no balls to make important compromises. It’s not time to EITHER reduce military spending or reduce entitlements. It’s time to do both. It’s not time to EITHER shrink social programs or tax the rich. It’s time to do both.

I guarantee you that Americans from damn near any generation before ours would have addressed this issue well before now. Why is it so hard for us?

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This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
--Emerson