Should the district voter trust LearnYES.org, a political action committee supporting the 15 percent M&O budget override for the Cave Creek Unified District? Probably not!
With the override special election coming in November, LearnYES, in its 2011 override campaign Q&A, has dragged out that old shibboleth about increasing class sizes if the overrides were rejected. Well, even with both M&O/K-3 override funding in place in the past several years, average CCUSD class sizes have continued to increase from 18.5 students per teacher (2005-6 school year) to 20.3 students per teacher (2009-10 school year). This is what the state Auditor General has reported to the state legislature in its performance audits of CCUSD.
The voter might ask "if not used for lowering class sizes, where did the previous override money go"? It did not go into the classroom! According to these performance audits, $3,902 per student was spent in the classroom in 2005-6 as compared to $3,921 per student in the 2009-10 school year. Yet, the total funding spent per student (classroom and non-classroom) rose about 10 percent, increasing from $6,552 per student in 2005-6 to $7,210 per student in 2009-10.
The district voter should again ask "where did the override money go?" Well, it went into non-classroom spending: $2,650 per student in 2005-6 to $3,289 per student in 2009-10, while classroom spending remained relatively flat. Did the LearnYES committee members forget to read the state Auditor General school district performance audits before appealing to the voter for additional override funding to increase classroom spending?
Despite the M&O/K-3 override funding during most of the period (2005-6 to 2009-10 school years), the number of CCUSD teachers declined from 318 to 285 while non-teaching staff also declined from 362 to 328. The level of non-teaching staff continued to exceed the number of teachers (by about 40-45 individuals) in both the 2005-6 and 2009-10 school years.
The LearnYES political action committee stated that 85 percent of the school districts the size of CCUSD and larger had M&O overrides. Does this PAC presume to compare CCUSD with Mesa USD (64,000 students, 88 schools), Deer Valley USD (35,000 students, 37 schools), Paradise Valley USD (32,000 students, 46 schools) and Scottsdale USD (25,000 students, 31 schools) which have much different financial needs because of their sizes? If district voters compare CCUSD (5,608 students, 8 schools in 2009-10) with other Arizona school districts of similar size (5,232-6,130 students, 8-10 schools), they will find that 3 of the total 9 peer school districts have neither M&O nor K-3 overrides, only two peer districts (including CCUSD) have both M&O/K-3 overrides and the remaining four have only M&O overrides.
LearnYES PAC also pointed out that the previous overrides were rejected by the district voters by narrow margins. Not so! The original M&O override in the spring of 2007 was approved by 603 votes while the later K-3 overrides were rejected by district voters by 1,011 votes in November 2009 and by 2,080 votes in November 2008. Didn't this political action committee check previous vote tallies before appealing for future M&O overrides?
LearnYES states that the "override currently funds over 50 teachers". Override funds are fungible and can be spent on non-classroom operations as well as in the classroom. In fact, the state Auditor General says "The additional money made available to districts through budget overrides does not appears to increase the percentage of dollars spent in the classroom.....the additional money received through budget overrides appears to be flowing into the classroom at the same rate as other monies"(i.e., normal M&O funding).
Given the above inconsistencies, why should the district taxpayer trust the LearnYES.org political action committee's statements in support of CCUSD's 15 percent M&O budget override? One wonders.
Alexei Westphal | E-mail
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Pro Choice
In 2012 the American electorate will be asked to chose the next President of the United States, but will they have a true choice? As of this moment the mass media are advancing the same strategy that gave us Barrack Hussein Obama in 2008. In that previous campaign the former media darling John McCain (and choice of the media), once nominated, was pilloried, damned for a lout and dubbed the "Next Bush" making him the sure looser. That same smug, self aggrandizing media seeks to choose Mitt Romney for us by shining the light of favorable national coverage on him at the expense of all other candidates. Once officially the nominee, they will turn on Mr. Romney like the vicious curs they are to treat him like something one would scrap off of a shoe.
Mr. Romney is not my choice as Mr. McCain before him for much the same reason, the lack of depth in conservative values. Rank and file Republicans and Tea Party members need to choose their candidate from the field of qualified and available candidates without the unwanted intervention of the liberal media. Not one of my top three preferences is an announced candidate, no matter, my vote goes to the most conservative hopeful running. I am Pro Choice in that I want a hand in choosing a candidate that reflects my values not that of the dominate media hacks.
Randy Edwards | Cave Creek
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TEA Party American Patriots v. NUT Party big taxes, big-spending, job killers
American Patriot taxpayers are held "hostage" by radical, left-wing, big-spending, wasteful Democrats.
President Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats say Republicans want to reduce Medicare when in fact; Capitol Hill Democrats, themselves, removed $500 billion from Medicare. President Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats are deceitful scoundrels (www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/04/democrats-win-cuts-of-400-billion-to-medicare/?feat=home_headlines).
"Taxed Enough Already" (TEA) Party members and supporters are appreciative to President Obama and the Democrat Party, hereinafter referred to as the "Never Under Taxed" (NUT) Party for their continuation to enlighten Americans why Americans should support the TEA Party. President Obama and Capitol Hill NUT Party members articulate how shallow they support Constitutional freedoms and Judeo-Christian values.
Upper income taxpayers are overburdened while President Obama and Capitol Hill NUT Party members wastefully spend (y)our taxpayers' money. Some 50 percent of all Americans pay no taxes. Some 5 percent of upper income taxpayers pay some 59 percent of all taxes.
Upper income entrepreneurs work harder, work smarter, and work longer hours, to earn more income for their success. These are the men and women who produce jobs. A majority of workers are unwilling to perform similarly. When are increasing taxes excessive enough?
TEA Party supporters are normal hard-working American Patriots combating wasteful spending in support of tax reform allowing "job creators" in an effort to generate new jobs and expand existing jobs.
What President Obama and Capitol Hill NUT Party members fail to understand is that if they would reduce taxes, lessen government interference, and get out of the way, our economy would come back strong.
Oscar Y. Harward | Monroe, North Carolina
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Let My People Work
Everyone agrees that one of most urgent needs in this economic crisis is to produce more jobs. President Obama’s method, along with all the liberals in government, is to use stimulus. The problems with that idea are that it does not work and that we have no money left to use as a stimulus.
But the federal government can do something; it can stop throwing road blocks like minimum wage laws and workplace restrictions in the path of job creation. And, even more immediately, the states do not need to wait for the federal government to act because all 50 states have their own road blocks to employment that could be lifted.
The most damaging of these state road blocks is occupational licensing. The mere idea that anyone should be required to ask government’s permission to practice a profession should be offensive to anyone who cares about liberty and productivity. In Arizona there are scores of such laws and most of these government prohibitions also involve a regulatory board or commission to enforce the rules.
Does anyone seriously believe that we should have to ask government’s permission to be a barber or a cosmetologist or, for that matter, to practice any profession? The applicable regulatory bodies claim to be protecting the public but they actually exist to keep the competition out and keep the prices up. These licensing laws also require a lot of up-front education and continuing education so, naturally, there is another whole group of people in the education arena who support these economically harmful laws.
Thoreau said “Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way." Let’s get this economy moving by ending government restraints on people who want to work.
Some employee terminations help the economy
There is a myth going around that, even if government employees are inefficient or unneeded, we should not terminate them in this economic crisis because it would dampen the economy. The opposite is actually the truth. Because most government employees do not produce wealth (they tax and regulate the ones who do produce wealth), it would be better to for them to seek employment in the private sector, in jobs that produce wealth and that, therefore, add to the economy. And, there is actually a double benefit because we would then not have to tax productive private sector employees as much to pay the salaries of those former government employees. Let the axe fall.
Roy Miller | Phoenix
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Arizona Republic now providing free advertisement?
Here is the comment I had posted in response to the repeated article by Sonja Haller. It appeared on July 19 [Carefree launches campaign to market itself as own town] and again today in the Scottsdale Republic.
With equity markets in meltdown, a growing national debt disgrace, and administration leadership as effective as TidyBowl in Arizona, this is the best you've got? The same material, almost exactly word for word, was published on July 19. Sonja, you must be very chummy with the Carefree Business Association. This should be labeled as a paid advertisement because it certainly isn’t news, and it isn’t even accurate. Was there any research done, or did you just use their script?
I guess we are stuck with the brainless management and reporting of the Republic.
John Traynor | Carefree
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Do you hate or love Tea Party policies?
Tea Party facts can’t be denied so their reputations are attacked.
Since the beginning of the debt ceiling debate, Democrats have criticized Tea Party representatives for taking a hard-line stance on spending cuts and caps. During the debate they were described as "rebels" and attacked as unwilling to compromise.
Now, the Obama administration is attempting to blame the Tea Party for Standard & Poor's downgrade of the government's credit rating last Friday. And some critics are even insisting that members of the Tea Party should be viewed as "economic terrorists."
On CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday, Obama advisor David Axelrod said the loss of
America's AAA-rating was "essentially a Tea Party downgrade" and claimed the Tea Party "brought us to the brink of a default."
The accusation is false, but it's also irrelevant. The credit rating downgrade had nothing to do with how close the U.S. came to the August 2 "deadline" for raising the debt ceiling. The Tea Party argued all along that the catastrophic predictions were little more than a tool used by opponents of fiscal responsibility to push for a watered-down compromise.
Rather, the downgrade had everything to do with the medium- and long-term outlook for spending and debt. S&P stated in its rationale for the downgrade that "the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration agreed to this week falls short of the amount that we believe it necessary to stabilize the general government debt burden by the middle of the decade." In other words – the debt ceiling compromise didn't go far enough.
From the outset of the debt ceiling debate, the freshman Tea Party class in Congress made one point clear: that without substantial cuts in spending, the U.S. would be downgraded. Simply stated, we have a massive debt crisis being driven by a failure to rein in federal spending.
As Tea Party members warned, S&P said that unless $4 trillion was cut from the budget, the U.S. would face a downgrade. Washington only managed half that target, passing a debt ceiling bill that aims to cut $2 trillion over 10 years, and sets the U.S. up for trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
The Tea Party has argued all along that now is the time to rein in out-of-control spending and get the government on a path toward long-term fiscal responsibility.
Conservative members of Congress were criticized for insisting that we must address this problem immediately, and the establishment was unfortunately successful in kicking the debt can further down the road. The Tea Party was vindicated by the S&P rationale for the downgrade, however, which noted that waiting until after the 2012 elections to enact real change will mean facing an even higher government debt burden and greater "fiscal adjustment."
Responsibility for the credit downgrade rests not with the Tea Party, but with an administration that has added $4.3 trillion to the national debt in less than three years and with an establishment that has balked at efforts to enact substantial reforms. Tea Party members are the people who have been sounding the alarm about our financial mess for years. Tea Party representatives in Congress are the only ones presenting substantial reforms, such as the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act.
(Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky. said that blaming the Tea Party is sort of like blaming the fireman when he comes to put out the fire.)
Members of the Tea Party shouldn't be apologizing for the credit downgrade or the rest of our financial mess. They should be saying, "We told you so."
Matt Kibbe
President and CEO of FreedomWorks
For free Politically Incorrect news ignored by the American news media, send your friends' email addresses for REAL NEWS from [email protected].
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A simple workable plan
Last week the debt limit was raised and default on our national debt payments averted; at least for now. But, nothing meaningful was done about the national debt or the rate at which it's growing. According to ABC World News the current debt of $14,000,000,000,000 will likely increase to $27,000,000,000,000 in 10 years, nearly doubled.
Our national debt has been increasing at an ever increasing rate since the 1960s. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have had the will to do what should have been done in the past 50 years. They didn't have it this past week either! Is there any reason to expect they will ever have it? We must do something quickly!
There is a simple solution. Stop electing career politicians and replace them with ordinary citizens. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it. The career politician carries so much baggage; party allegiance, re-election concerns, prior courting by lobbyists and such. An ordinary citizen carries none. Think about it; an ordinary citizen candidate in the primary of all 435 representatives in 2012.
A present day patriot, Tim Cox, has developed a simple, workable plan.
It's all described at www.goooh.com. Please help take our government back.
Glen Terrell | Arlington, Texas
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The most stupid story of the year
This has got to be the most stupid story of the year. When the Green Bay Packers visited the White House on Friday to celebrate the team's Super Bowl title, linebacker Desmond Bishop was not allowed to enter. He forgot his license on the team charter plane and without a license, White House security would not let him in. Read the story here: http://sports.yahoo. com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/Packers-linebacker-forgets-ID-can-8217-t-get-i?urn=nfl-wp5018
Needless to say, Desmond Bishop is a well-known football player.
Yet, Congress let Barack Obama, who is not an Article II "natural born Citizen," who has yet to show us a valid birth certificate, social security number, and selective service registration, and who was never properly vetted, not only to live in the White House, but also to assume the singular and great civil and military powers of the Office of President and Commander in Chief of the Military. I guess a well-known professional football player entering the White House for a short social visit for the purpose of celebrating his team's Super Bowl victory without his license is a greater national security risk than allowing a person who has refused to properly identify himself to not only live in the White House but also to assume power over our nuclear arsenal and to learn our national military secrets.
As the old saying goes, I could not make this stuff up.
Mario Apuzzo, Esq. | E-mail
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A unique zip code for the boundaries of the Town of Cave Creek
A change of address will cost each resident of the 85331 zip code about $100 and take a year to effect. There will also be costs associated with forwarded mail being delayed and an increased chance of mail being lost die to increased handling.
As the number of residents of the town is quite small compared to the number of residents in 85331, I suggest a cost effective way of granting the request. Leave the postal address for all residents outside the town as “Cave Creek 85331” and give a new zip code to the residents of the town as “Cave Creek (new zip code).” Only the residents of the town would have a change of address and as it is their request, that would be fair.
This solution will satisfy the request of the local politicians for an accurate way to mail political campaign information, make crime statistics more accurate, reduce the confusion over town services, relieve 85331 residents of the burden of paying Cave Creek sales taxes and satisfy the desire for an identity of the town.
A number of us live in County Islands and of necessity must have a “town or city” in our address or should we ask for a “unique zip code?” Cave Creek politicians do not want to be associated with us and we do not want to pay Cave Creek sales taxes. We do not want to pay for their identity problem.
Thank you.
Charlie Eller | Cave Creek
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