WyBlog

The $26 billion teacher bailout, where is the Tenth Amendment when you need it?

Once the RINO twins caved it was a foregone conclusion, and today Nancy Pelosi got her $26 billion teachers' union bailout passed in the House. Barry will presumably take a break from his back-to-back-to-back vacations to sign the bill.

NJ Governor Chris Christie was inclined to decline the money. Good for him. Pelosi et al are after all rewarding bad behavior. State governments spend too much money. So naturally when they run out of money the "solution" is to give them more money. Cutting spending is just too darn hard!

You could say government is addicted to spending. And the Democrats are hell-bent on feeding that addiction. Because that's we do with crack addicts, right? Give them more crack? Giving money to the government employee unions is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

And you'll note that I said "was" when mentioning what Gov. Christie planned to do. See it turns out that this particular bailout bill says if a state refuses the money the federal government will dole it out anyway. The Secretary of Education gets to decide which local school districts win the bailout lottery. Or the state government can "accept" the bailout, and then they are permitted to allocate the funds.

Did I miss something? Was the Tenth Amendment repealed one day while I was away on vacation? Because the Constitution sure doesn't give a federal bureaucrat the right to dictate how a local NJ school district spends its money! If the citizens vote to cut spending then by golly the school district had better cut spending. And in something like 59% of our school districts that's exactly what the citizens did.

Now we have Nancy Pelosi saying she knows better? That this money, which we cannot refuse, must be spent on teacher compensation?

I'd love to see a guy like Chris Christie challenge the constitutionality of this absurd mandate. If the Tenth Amendment means anything it guarantees that local school districts can control their own budgets.

What Governor Christie did decide to do is "accept" the money so he can control where it goes. Which means that sometime around January 1^st we'll get a check for about $268 million dollars. And it has to be spent on "teacher compensation".

Fine. Dump the entire $268 million into the woefully underfunded pension plan. Pension contributions are "compensation", aren't they?

Sure it's a drop in the bucket when the pension deficit is pegged at $45 billion, but what else should he prudently do with a one-time infusion of ill-gotten money? Spending it to hire more teachers just creates the need for another bailout next year. And the year after that too. It's not like NJ will find the money to fund those new positions in perpetuity, not without whopping tax increases.

The union won't like it of course, but I hardly believe that Gov. Christie cares what they like or don't like. Barry and Nancy won't like it much either. Too bad. Let's see them argue against that pesky Tenth Amendment.

Posted at 21:31 by Chris Wysocki   [/democrats]   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |
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