20081228 2008 Wrap Up

Let me tell you, Dear Reader, those self absorbed looks back at the year gone by really annoy me worse than Pee Wee Herman trying to help while I’m replacing a windshield wiper on the van. Well, it’s the end of the year and time to look back at whether this blog has been on the money or not in my bold predictions.

Straightforwardly stating what is going to happen in the future is a dangerous business. In the May 2000 issue of Digital Time editor Joshua Quittner proclaimed that the technology boom “continues without end”. Sadly, the economy had begun contracting two months earlier. And, when was the last time you saw a copy of Digital Time on the Newsstand.

Back in 2007, this blog predicted that gasoline would hit four dollars a gallon as oil neared two hundred dollars a barrel, but when the economy tanked, the speculators would bail, oil would drop to forty-five dollars a barrel and the price at the pump would follow. I was told that I was being too extreme. As it turns out, I was too conservative. Gasoline went to well over four dollars a gallon here in New York. Now, as the country is deep in recession, oil is down to thirty-eight dollars a barrel.

When the economy was booming and the stock market was hitting new highs, this blog said that a recession was coming. While I was not carrying a sign saying that the end was near, real estate was overinflated and a tremendous amount of debt was leveraged on these superheated values. What was surprising was the number of people who wrote in saying that major recessions were a thing of the past and we could never experience another one. I’m sure those people never lost sleep until the day they lost everything.

One thing that I was wrong about was the breadth and depth of the recession. When I saw it coming, I thought I was smart because I cashed out some money and moved it overseas in Brazil, Russia, India and China. I did not see that a collapsing world commodities market would hit the Brazilian stock market so hard. I did not expect Russia’s president to go crazy and cause the world to back out of Russian stocks and create a severe Russian recession. I did not count on fear of terrorism to effect India so much. I really did not expect the Chinese to go into the huge financial spiral that it did for another five to ten years. For all of our hand wringing, the financial market in America has held up better than most of the world.

On April twentieth, Notes from the Red Lodge predicted that the big push toward ethanol would lead to higher food prices, wide spread inflation and third world starvation. Sadly, this has happened. Now that oil has dropped, this year’s harvest has already been lost and food prices have stayed up. It is nearly impossible to buy gasoline that is not labeled ten percent ethanol so we continue to destroy the environment.

After examining president elect Obama’s energy policy, the blog predicted that Democratic congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would begin implementing it before 2009 was over. The core of the plan is not to encourage new energy sources but to punish the use of gasoline by artificially keeping the price at the gas pump above six dollars a gallon. Now, before 2009 has even started, legislation is being prepared to double the federal tax on gasoline.

Now, what do I want for the year ahead? I hope that next year I can say that I was wrong on the policies implemented in Washington pulled us out of the recession. I also hope that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd and share a podium so they can announce that they are frauds and will be stepping down and retiring from public life.

20081214 Paying for Public Education

A few months ago school tax bills went out to this part of the country. Here in New York State, we spend more money per student than any other state spends but our students do not rank nearly as well as many other states. In fact, they do rather poorly. While we do not want to short change our students, New York’s standings make a strong case that blindly spending money does not equal a good education.

I, myself, am a product of New York State’s public school system. More so, I am a product of my parents being actively involved in my education from day one. They knew every teacher I had. They went to every open house. They looked at my homework. They knew who I was hanging out with. That was a bigger factor than how much was spent at the public school where we had drafty portable classrooms and broken lab equipment. In fact, the successes I have had in life came from life lessons outside of school.

My son attends a private school for a myriad of reasons. Receiving a quality education is not the least of these reasons.

I have three school tax bills, all in Rensselaer County within two school districts. Any one of those three school tax bills is just slightly less than what I pay for one year’s worth of private school. The operating budgets for those two school districts dwarfs what my son’s school has at its disposal. The amount they spend per student is many times over what my son’s school spends. Yet my son’s school has test scores well about the public school. More importantly, the graduation is statistically at one hundred percent, there is no drug problem and none of the girls are pregnant.

It may not be a real world solution, but you have to ask, wouldn’t we be better off turning the public schools over to the people who run private schools. If the children got a better education and the public’s tax burden was reduced, isn’t society better off? Isn’t that the essence of good government?

Of course, just handing over the keys to the office is not going to be the answer. As I have already stated, the conditions at the school are secondary to the framework created by the child’s home life. But as long as the classroom is geared toward the least common denominator, the chance of excellence is severely stunted.

One thing our educational system has especially failed society is in teaching students life lessons about their own finances. Most high school graduates do not understand what money is or how it works. At this moment, the citizens and government of the United States is looking around for places to put blame. Do credit card companies take advantage of users? Do mortgage companies take advantage of borrowers? Is health insurance inaccessible? Who owns the big corporations?

We have a society filled with citizens who do not know if a house is an asset or a liability? Should they buy a car or lease one? Is a time share ever a good deal?

Do the people who teach our children know the answers to these questions or do they believe that thinking about money diminishes them? Do the people on the school board know these things? Does the school’s business manager know these things?

Perhaps we need to take responsibility for our own lives and learn these things for ourselves and then pass them on to our children. But we have digressed from the primary question of this article: is there a better way to run our schools to spend money but increase the quality of the education? As a group, we consistently stress the importance of a good education, but are we willing to take a long, hard look at what that means?