Too Many Chiefs?

I must have driven by this building hundreds of times.  I knew that this is the administration building for the Omaha Public Schools, but it never sunk in how BIG this building is.  The bricks and mortar part has a footprint of about two city blocks, and a part of it is five stories high.  The parking area amounts to another three blocks.

   When this place fills up on a workday, what in the world does everyone DO?? 

In spite of all the direction that comes out of this hallowed ediface, we still have students that do not graduate and have trouble with reading and math.  I don't know what it costs to educate the individual student, but I'll just bet that a very sizable part of that amount is soaked up by the bureaucrats in  the Admin Building.     

So, the next time some politician wants to fire teachers or close schools or cut important programs because of a tight budget,  let's remind him that maybe we could do with a few empty chairs in this place.

 

Social Justice

I'm going to go out on thin ice with this one.  Our church is very strong into the concept of "Social Justice", which is supposed to mean that those people who have a lot should help the ones that don't have a lot.  I surely do not have a problem with that.  There are plenty of people who, through no fault of their own, are not able to properly provide for themselves - people with physical or mental disabilities, a mother left to care for her family when she loses her husband, older people who can no longer provide for their own maintenance, etc.  If one has the means, he has a moral obligation to chip in and make life better for these poor souls. 

Our politicians today have twisted this biblical mandate into "Take from the rich and give to the poor", and still call it Social Justice.  One big problem here is that we need to differentiate between the truly needy and those that are gaming the system.  I have had a lot of opportunity to observe people receiving assistance that probably don't need it.  Here are just a few examples:

• Having managed Section 8 housing, I can't begin to tell you how many of the residents shouldn't be there.  So often, single mothers have baby after baby, receive added benefits, and the sperm donor who often lives with her does not have to help raise his kids.  If the woman marries the guy, she loses the government help.  One woman that I remember had so many kids that we had to put her in a 4-bedroom unit.  All the while her live-in paramour was making $30000 annually and didn't have to contribute at all.  On another case, I did some calculating on what it cost the government to keep a single mother with three kids in a three bedroom apartment.  With the rent payment, ADC, food stamps,  no-deductible  health insurance (including dental and optical) and a couple of other things, the figure was over $50000.  To put this in perspective, at that time (maybe 15 years ago) my total income tax obligation for that year was $4400. This means that every last cent of taxes that was collected from more than eleven families like mine had to be used to support this family.  Why couldn't she support herself?  She was a drug addict, and admitted that she was trading food stamps for drugs. 
• East of where I live is a grocery store where a lot of people on assistance do their shopping.  Maybe I' m being petty about this, but it really irks me when some flashy woman in front of me in the checkout line, with a leather coat, a fancy nail job and hairdo, and color-coordinated shoes, pays with food stamps.  I don't begrudge her wanting to look nice, but couldn't she use some of her own money to buy groceries?  And it seems that invariably, when you pull into the parking lot, you will find some guy sitting in the passenger seat of a car, listening to the radio while the lady of the house is in the store buying the groceries.  (Me being petty again)
• Logan-Fontanelle was a subsidized housing project in the eastern part of Omaha.  When it was new, it was a model property, meant to be a very nice place to live for the people who needed to be there.  A few years ago it was razed to the ground because it was too dangerous to live there.  It was riddled with drug users and dealers, and violence was commonplace.  What a waste of taxpayer dollars!!

Well, we know at least part of the problem. so what can be done about it?  Obviously, we need to determine who the gamers are.  Closer monitoring and random spot checks would go a long way.  And I don't care if it does infringe on a person's privacy, if you expect the taxpayers to support you, you are going to have to pass a drug test.  If another person is living in the home of someone on assistance, that should be easy enough to determine, and he (she) should be made to help with expenses.  On the other side of the coin, the people who actually need help should be getting it on time and in an adequate amount, and procedures should be put in place to make sure that happens.

One final point.  Politicians - please don't use the "poor" as a tool to buy votes.  It hasn't escaped our notice that those who are on the receiving end tend to vote for the candidate who promises to keep the payments coming.  We taxpayers have feelings, too.

Election's Getting Closer

Basically, I am a simple guy.  I don't deal with totally accurate numbers and statistics, and probably couldn't remember them anyway.  So, I prefer to deal with general ideas that aren't too complicated and try to make sense of them.  This is just a clever lead-in to a simple discussion of the coming election.  For the record, I am a registered Republican, and have been since George W. Bush was a candidate for the Presidency.  Not that I liked Bush all that much at the time; I just knew that Gore was a slick-talking phony and I didn't want him to be our President.

It seems that Mitt Romney will be leading the fight for the Republicans against the incumbent Barak Obama.  I guess I am a bit ambivalent about Romney - he is somewhat of a smooth talker himself and is pretty good at sticking to his safe talking points.  The good thing is that his talking points are generally what we Conservatives want to hear.  I worry that his personality is not forceful enough to energize the people who need to vote for him.  (I'm thinking of an in-your-face extrovert type like Chris Christie.)  Of all the candidates in the Primaries, my first choice would have been Herman Cain (he came up with a 9-9-9 plan that made a lot of sense); second was Newt Gingrich (he knows a lot about everything and has the ability to articulate); and then Romney in third place.  In my opinion, Romney has one quality that may propel him into the Presidency - a willingness to do whatever is necessary to win.  Case in point - his people dug up enough dirt to get rid of Cain and Gingrich.  Maybe he can use these tactics to find some serious dirt on Obama. 

Here are some of the issues as I see them:

• We desperately need to get our financial house in order - quit spending more than we take in, and eventually reduce the national debt.  Right now, our annual debt service amounts to more than $450 billion , and that is at a rate of about 3% interest.  If the interest goes up to the traditional 5-6%, that amount would take a significant jump.
• Our tax code is an absolute mess.  It should be broad-based and fair, and all the loopholes should be eliminated. (Think FairTax!)
• It is vitally important that we become self-sufficient in energy.  Our energy dependence puts us at a huge disadvantage against the likes of China and the oil producers that we have to buy from.  We have the resources - we just need to use them.
• We need to do something serious about health care.  Five days in a hospital (monitors and pills, no surgery) should not cost over $100,000.
• Figure out a common sense approach to first class education.  The amount we spend per student should produce the best education in the world.

There are a lot more very important issues than I have listed here.  Our assignment is to find out which candidate is going to really deal with our problems.  We, the voters, have the awesome responsibility to put the right person in office.  Remember, all of the problems we are facing right now were caused by the people we voted for and sent to Washington.  If they screwed up or lied to us, it is because we didn't do our homework before we voted.  There is hope, though, because we always get another chance in America, and the next one will happen in November of this year.