Charter Schools, Taxing Wealth, Obamacare's Nightmares, G.O.P. Demise Predicted, Flight 370 and "The Kiss"

Charter Schools Critcized

Many school districts are plagued by the appearance of Charter Schools on the scene.  Such schools, according to the laws of the states where they are located, receive a fixed amount from the local taxing authority which would normally go to the area's public schools for each child enrolled in the Charter School.

Here in Florida, Public schools are hurting because of this loss in enrollment and funding being switched over to Charter Schools.  Some parents feel their children can receive a better education in a Charter School, since Charter Schools can exclude certain students from their student body, often ones with language, disciplinary or emotional problems.  They don't have to fund "special ed" programs for such students, resulting in lower costs, while Public Schools must provide for such students.  Finally, Charter Schools often are able to hire teachers who would not meet the certifications required in Public Schools, and often, do not have Teachers' unions with which to deal.

Charter Schools have been most successful in urban areas where highly specialized education programs can be made available to students who come from backgrounds far different from those of the typical Public School student.  In other areas, Charter Schools enable a parent to send their children to schools where the problems associated with "difficult" or "special" students are absent.  Sometimes, particularly in the South, Charter Schools provide parents with the opportunity to send their children to schools which are less integrated than Public Schools.

Charter School in Miami area

The following "Opinion" piece appeared on the Editorial page of the Palm Beach Post last week.  I found it very informative and pass it on to you:

I am from Jacksonville, but I often read The Post’s Extra Credit education blog. It is excellent and gives me coverage of state issues I don’t get back home.

I was amazed to read what you reported Rep. Travis Hutson, R-Palm Coast, said. He said: “You show me one charter school that has failed, and I’ll show you an ‘F’ school that has been open for 10 years wasting taxpayer money.”

I could show him a list of 260 charter schools that have failed; I mean, literally failed, as in no longer in business. That is 260 Florida charter schools that have opened, taken taxpayer money, then closed, leaving families and communities in a lurch. Talk about wasting taxpayer money.

I could also show him that despite reports to the contrary, public schools are the best thing going. The Stanford CREDO, the definitive charter school study, says children who attend Florida’s charter schools lag behind their public school peers. And charters often are able to pick who they take and keep, and have lower percentages of disabled and English-as-a-second-language learners. I could show him that if your child was attending a charter school they were seven times more likely to be attending a failing school than if they were attending a public school.

Let me tell you about a charter school that was just approved in Jacksonville, the kind of which Huston would like to see more. The land was purchased and school built by Red Apple, the construction/leasing arm of the for-profit Charter Schools USA outfit. It is then leased to Renaissance Charters, the nonprofit arm of the aforementioned Charter Schools USA; and if history holds true, above fair-market value. Renaissance then turned around and hired Charter School USA to manage the school, sending an undetermined amount of management fees. Moreover, the three schools closest to the new charter are all “A” schools, which means there is no failing school to be replaced.

Jonathan K. Hage, CEO of Charter Schools USA, operates just 58 schools and takes home millions in compensation. He lives in a $1.8 million house and sends his children to an expensive private school. By comparison, our superintendent runs 161 schools, makes $275,000 and sends his children to public schools. I don’t know how much his house is worth, but I’m sure it’s worth less than $1.8 million. Furthermore, Hage routinely takes his $350,000, 43-foot yacht — named Fishin-4-Schools — out on the water.

I really don’t understand how so many anti-public education legislators got elected, and why they insist on throwing money to millionaires. But I appreciate The Palm Beach Post and reporter Jason Schultz for letting us know about them.

Chris Guerrieri, Jacksonville, FL

Hage's boat, Fishin-4-Schools, was recently put on the market

Your comments, pro or con, are welcome and will be posted on the blog.  Just Email them to Riart1@aol.com
Jack Lippman

                                                       

G.O.P. Demise Predicted Before Mid-Century ... UNLESS

Ultimately, our country will enact some sort of immigration reform which to some extent will increase the number of Latino voters.  Given the G.O.P.’s refusal to actively push for and support such reform, this is likely to increase the number of Democratic voters nationwide. 

  

In addition, poorer people recognize that the solvency of the Government’s “safety net” (unemployment insurance, supplementary nutritional aid, aid for dependent children, Medicaid and various other social programs) is generally fought for by Democrats and threatened by Republicans.  Hence, people on the lower end of the economic scale, many of whom are Black, tend to vote Democratic.  They also have a higher birth rate than Americans with higher incomes, which over the years will result in more voters from this demographic.

Taken together, these factors spell disaster for the Republican Party.  It may not happen this year, nor for another ten or twenty years, but sooner or later the Republican voter base will shrink to the point where it will not even be sufficient to control State Legislatures (which enable them to "gerrymander" Congressional districts), state houses, Congress itself and of course the ability to elect a President.  It's simply a matter of demographics. 

Republicans know this and many want to change their party’s position on these issues.  Other parts of the G.O.P. which do not want to make these changes seem to be calling the tune.  Their tactic, and it is the one the Republicans are following today, is to attempt to disenfranchise as many of the prospective Democratic voters discussed above by limiting early voting hours, making voter registration more difficult and under the guise of fighting non-existent voter fraud, demanding stricter voter identification documents at polling stations.

 

This is the last stand of the anti-spending, anti-gun control, anti-health care reform, anti-business regulation, anti-environment, anti-women’s rights Republican Party, otherwise devoted to preserving the wealth of the wealthiest of Americans.  The G.O.P. is certain to sink into the sunset along with the Whigs and Know-Nothings before mid-century UNLESS its position on social issues changes radically.

JL

                                                             

Taxing Wealth Instead of Income?

According to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek, one-one hundredth of one percent of our nation’s population possesses as much wealth as the poorer two thirds of our population!  That tiny percentage amounts to a mere 16,000 people.

Bill Gates doesn’t work any longer and gives away money through his foundations as quickly as he can.  Nevertheless, his wealth piles up by the millions every year.  There are terrible inequities in the distribution of wealth in this country which are growing each year and can no longer be ignored.  They have put the government in the costly position of establishing safety nets for those who possess a minimal amount of, if any, our nation's (or the world's) wealth. 




Is it time to tax what he's sitting on rather than what he earned or accumulated that year?

Economists who are attempting to analyze this situation recognize that it is not merely a domestic problem, but a world-wide one as well.  The same thing is true, even to a greater degree in other countries, and the wealth of the 16,000 Americans included in that .01% group is usually invested throughout the globe, so more than our nation’s laws must be considered.  One suggested remedy is the world-wide taxation of wealth rather than of income.  This is an idea which will be seriously debated over the next decade or so, but cannot be ignored.  Would such a tax as a method of “wealth redistribution” be “confiscatory”? Is some type of peaceful "wealth redistribution" inevitable?  Would it be desirable?

JL 


                                                        

Flight 370



  

Okay, if the background checks on the pilot and co-pilot have ruled them out as the ones most likely to have taken Malaysian Air Flight 370 on its circuitous, radar-avoiding, hours-long route to the place where it ran out of fuel, and if it has been established that none of the passengers had such flying skills, who then did it?  Check out the posting on this blog on March 25 for a possible answer.  

JL

                                                            

Critcal of Obamacare?  Does it give you nightmares?  Read New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's take on the healthcare nightmare the country faces.  (From the New York Times, April 10, 2014.)

Health Care Nightmares

Paul Krugman

When it comes to health reform, Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster. They know, just know, that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to utter failure, so failure is what they see, never mind the facts on the ground.

Thus, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, dismissed the push for pay equity as an attempt to “change the subject from the nightmare of Obamacare”; on the same day, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study estimating “a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014.” Some nightmare. And the overall gain, including children and those who signed up during the late-March enrollment surge, must be considerably larger.

But while Obamacare is looking like anything but a nightmare, there are indeed some nightmarish things happening on the health care front. For it turns out that there’s a startling ugliness of spirit abroad in modern America — and health reform has brought that ugliness out into the open.

Let’s start with the good news about reform, which keeps coming in. First, there was the amazing come-from-behind surge in enrollments. Then there were a series of surveys — from Gallup, the Urban Institure, and RAND — all suggesting large gains in coverage. Taken individually, any one of these indicators might be dismissed as an outlier, but taken together they paint an unmistakable picture of major progress.

But wait: What about all the people who lost their policies thanks to Obamacare? The answer is that this looks more than ever like a relatively small issue hyped by right-wing propaganda. RAND finds that fewer than a million people who previously had individual insurance became uninsured — and many of those transitions, one guesses, had nothing to do with Obamacare. It’s worth noting that, so far, not one of the supposed horror stories touted in Koch-backed anti-reform advertisements has stood up to scrutiny, suggesting that real horror stories are rare.

It will be months before we have a full picture, but it’s clear that the number of uninsured Americans has already dropped significantly — not least in Mr. McConnell’s home state. It appears that around 40% of Kentucky's uninsured population has already gained coverage, and we can expect a lot more people to sign up next year.

House Speaker John Boehner's quandry

Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond to these developments. They can’t offer any real alternative to Obamacare, because you can’t achieve the good stuff in the Affordable Care Act, like coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, without also including the stuff they hate, the requirement that everyone buy insurance and the subsidies that make that requirement possible. Their political strategy has been to talk vaguely about replacing reform while waiting for its inevitable collapse. And what if reform doesn’t collapse? They have no idea what to do.

At the state level, however, Republican governors and legislators are still in a position to block the act’s expansion of Medicaid, denying health care to millions of vulnerable Americans. And they have seized that opportunity with gusto: Most Republican-controlled states, totaling half the nation, have rejected Medicaid expansion. And it shows. The number of uninsured Americans is dropping much faster in states accepting Medicaid expansion than in states rejecting it.

What’s amazing about this wave of rejection is that it appears to be motivated by pure spite. The federal government is prepared to pay for Medicaid expansion, so it would cost the states nothing, and would, in fact, provide an inflow of dollars. The health economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the principal architects of health reform — and normally a very mild-mannered guy — recently summed it up: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” Indeed.

And while supposed Obamacare horror stories keep on turning out to be false, it's already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.

But nobody expects to see a lot of prominent Republicans declaring that rejecting Medicaid expansion is wrong, that caring for Americans in need is more important than scoring political points against the Obama administration. As I said, there’s an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today’s America, which health reform has brought out into the open.

And that revelation, not reform itself — which is going pretty well — is the real Obamacare nightmare.

                                                                

THE KISS

Harvey Sage

She had a long, smooth, curved neck. Her body was perfectly proportioned exciting all who saw her as she gracefully shifted her weight walking. Her slender limbs were strong and attractive. Katie’s face was beautiful, photographed constantly and her tongue was long, moist and slender. She was the belle of the zoo, a spotted diva, a very attractive giraffe.

Mario lay on his bed, weak from terminal illness. His friends had brought him here at his request. For 25 years he had cared for his animals giving them food, cleaning them, and lots of love. His bed was placed in the yard so his babies could come and see him. He could barely raise his hand to stroke them as they nuzzled up to him. His friend Tito had brought food pellets and placed them in Mario’s hand. When the animals took the food they tickled his hand. Mario chuckled.

Katie came over. Mario stroked her head and told her he loved her. Then Katie did something that was seen by people all over the world via social media. She gave him a big wet kiss. Katie stayed by his side for a while and kissed him again. Soon after, Mario died.

 

Katie knew. Something in the air or the spirit world alerted her. For several days this voracious eater ate very little. She moped around, mingling very little with the other animals. Katie was mourning the death of Mario, the man she loved.

When Noah brought the animals into the ark there must have been a strong bond between him and them. Did it end there? When you see a dog greet his returning master with jumping joy you see animal love. I believe Mario, a kind and good man, is resting somewhere with his Creator. I believe Katie will join him when her time has come. I believe we’ll be with those with whom we share love, the most powerful force we’ve experienced.

Who knows? Sooner or later we’ll all find out.

(this latest posting based on true incident.)

  
                                                                 

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