The EdVocate West

Money for Nothing

August 6, 2010 at 12:48 am arunramanathan Leave a comment

When I was a boy, my father tried very hard to teach me about the value of the dollar. He never spent much money on much of anything than the education of his kids, an occasional driving vacation that always ended up seeing friend and relatives, and hosting a parade of nieces and nephews from India in our house and paying for their education. His perspective on the value of money came from the experience of immigrating to two different countries and working his way through various schools. His basic lessons were to never borrow money from a friend or relative, to pay any and all debts as quickly as possible, to spend money wisely with an eye to the future, and to save for unforseen events. 

Most of all – my father talked about the relationship between money, responsibility and accountability. You earned; You had a responsibility for spending your money wisely. And you were accountable for how you spent it.

Today, our federal government sent our states a big fat pot of money to bail them out and to bail out school districts. But what the federal government did not attach to those dollars was the responsibility to spend the money wisely and any accountability for how they spent it. The feds will not be sending out an IMF style requirement to states such as ours, who are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, to fix our broken system once and for all. Nor will they provide any accountability to ensure that our wonderful state with its politicians caught between feeding the interests and needs of public employee unions on one side and tax payer associations on the other side - does the right thing with those dollars. And by that I mean dong the right thing for the mass of its citizens and children whose needs and interests are typically ignored while our politicians are bowing to the special interests. Just the fact that the federal government took ten billion from the food stamps program in order to fund this one time grant to states and school districts is a sign of the lunacy of our current situation.

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