Public Albatrosses

Ah, the joys of government spending, where you can lose 6% of your clientele but scream bloody murder over a 0.7% cut in funding and get away with it.

In this case, I speak of New York City's public school system, which spends $31B on 1.05M students, or about $29,500 per. This is more than double the national average of $13,200 per, and is the highest in the nation.

In other words, NYC's public school kids aren't being short-changed, at least money-wise. Educationally, on the other hand? It's no secret that NYC's public schools underserve their clients.

Given the decrease in public school enrollment, that 0.7% budget cut translates to a 6% increase in per-student spending, or more than $1000 per. Yet the screams that "programs and staff" must be protected from this miniscule excision were as loud as they were inevitable.

Looks like the politicians are buckling. They're pretending they didn't know what they were voting for when they enacted the budget, and don't have the stones to tell the unions "you're getting more money per student, so cut the bullshit."

This is a textbook example (pun obviously intended) of the narrow-focused winning out over the greater good. There's no justifiable reason to keep spending levels constant if enrollment drops, but the people who'd make that argument and demand their money be properly managed have many other things to worry about. The teachers monopoly, on the other hand, cares about just the one thing, and will take the time and make the effort to be as noisy as possible (and lie without any shame) to keep money it shouldn't need.

This is why budgets and government spending keep growing. Adding money is easy, removing it is brutally difficult.

Politicians have learned to play the game, because the narrow interests are far more valuable to them (literally - their campaigns are funded therefrom) than the big picture. All you need to know to understand how perverse the bias is a basic understanding of baseline budgeting. Only in government is a 3% decrease to a scheduled 6% increase a “spending cut,” and either painted with "draconian" or "painful" or "steep" or "reckless" hyperbole or bragged about, even though spending actually increases.

Knowledge and suspicion are our first tools against this twisted mismanagement of our tax dollars. As is awareness that dire screams of imminent doom are a telltale.

The shriller the outrage, the bigger the lie.

Politicians risk little when they lie. Activists risk even less. Special interest shills risk nothing. With the Internet giving everyone and their grandmother a global platform, being heard above the general din requires instant-go-to-eleven outrage. Which only further deadens our ears and contributes to a broad cultural tinnitus that has us giving up too many of these fights.

The worst of these special interest shills? The public unions.

Public unions should not exist. Public sector employees are voters and taxpayers, just like everyone else, so they are represented by the same people who might be considered equivalents to the private sector management that counterweighs private sector unions. There is no counterweight to public unions, other than the much diffused and diluted interests of the voting taxpayers, so their rapacity is checked only by the competition with the other hogs at the government trough.

Indeed, progressive deity Franklin Delano Roosevelt was suspicious of public unions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.

In the private sector, a union that bleeds its host to the point of failure is cleared away by market forces. None such exist in the public sector, and a look across the landscape shows us how much damage public unions have done to the common good and the general welfare. They are the proverbial albatross around the nation's neck.

They're here to stay, unfortunately. But, we can try to rein them in, by rejecting their antics and histrionics in favor of a firm hand and a hard line.

All we need are some politicians with a bit more backbone.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.