[Vision2020] State Budget Deficits

[Joe Campbell]

There is nothing strategic nor helpful about across the board cuts. It
just reveals an inability to make difficult choices. And the budget
problems at WSU, which is actually worse off financially than UI, are
a direct result of the tax referendums passed over the last few years
together with the recession. In short, the state has lost the ability
to collect revenue.

When I was young I received an education at a state university
(Rutgers in New Jersey) at roughly $500 a semester. When I started at
WSU I taught logic classes with 40 students per class now I have
between 150-250 students. For some of those students it is not
possible to learn the material in a class of that size.

It seems that there are a lot of folks who benefited from the fact our
country once valued public education yet who are no longer willing to
"pay it forward" and help their children and others benefit in the
same way. You can say that we're in a mess financially and I suppose
that is true. But how many cars do you have, Roger? How many TV sets
and how large is your TV set? It isn't so much that we CAN'T pay for
public education as we are no longer willing to do so. We have no
problem paying $60,000 a year to put someone in prison but $5000 a
year to educate someone -- no way! We need to cut the budget across
the board according to you and Jeff but the billions of dollars we've
spent on two wars which had no basis in reason or ethics still goes
unquestioned.

It is a matter of values, not money. You and Jeff no longer value
public education; you are more willing to put your money toward war
and incarceration than education, for instance. That's how I see it.

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:29 AM, lfalen <lfalen at turbonet.com> wrote:
> Cutting spending across the board is a plan. It is better than what WSU and UI are doing. In this mornings Daily News there is an article on $13.5M in cuts at WSU. I have more respect for Gov. Gregoire than I used to. She seems to be trying to get the deficit under control .The problem is in where the cuts are being made. From the article- "Areas impacted the most are: College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Resources, Agricultural Research Center and WSU Extension; business and finance; and the College of Veterinary Medicine." I think that the reason these areas were selected is because these areas are the most likely to receive grants from industry. CALS has make their cuts in research areas for the same reason. This places an undue burden on these areas. These are both Land Grant intuitions and the cuts are being make where it hurts that mission the most. Cuts should have been uniform and across the board. The pay cuts at Idaho have bean at the lowest level(staff). These people
> can afford it the least. Pay cuts should have been a flat percentage across the board. A 5% cut for Administrators would go a lot further than a 20% cut for those Staff members with Research or Science in their title and a 5%  cut for Administrators would not  hurt them that much.
> Roger
> -----Original message-----
> From: Joe Campbell philosopher.joe at gmail.com
> Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 07:02:37 -0800
> To: Jeff Harkins jeffh at moscow.com
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] State Budget Deficits
>
>> Pretty revealing!
>>
>> No real plan here, no solution. Just complaints and a slogan: "Cut taxes!"
>>
>> For which of the values on your list is this appropriate?
>>
>>
>> On Jan 3, 2011, at 11:43 PM, Jeff Harkins <jeffh at moscow.com> wrote:
>>
>> > It's not "scare crap" - it's reality.
>> >
>> > How about 12% across the board?
>> >
>> > On 1/3/2011 2:40 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Any specific programs we should cut? Please be specific. There's no election, Jeff, so could just cut the scare crap and tell us what you think we should do, specifically what programs we should cut?
>> >>
>> >
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