FlashDangerpants wrote:That doesn't address any point I was making, nor does it target any political affiliations I hold.
We don't do your teachers' tenure system over here and from what I understand getting rid of it over there should priority one for both Dems and Repubs. If the teachers object then fuck them because their job is to teach kids and if they don't do that they can flip burgers. But school vouchers isn't a panacea, and neither are charter schools (I don't object to either on the whole). But you still have to spend more money on education either way.
You do realize that gerrymandering is based on the predictability of the black vote, which is monolithically Democratic.
Monolithic voting is the cause. Gerrymandering is the effect.
You’re looking at the leaves of the tree rather than the root. Monolithic voting is somewhere in between the leaf and the root. Perhaps in the pith, or the bark.
Gerrymandering is an effect of monolithic voting upon the political process of citizen representation.
Inquiring into the ignorance of voting against self-interest gets you closer to the root.
The monolithic black block ignorantly votes against its own self-interest in voting Democrat, as evidenced by decades of Democratic-ruled, crumbling economic deserts of inner cities.
Teachers are another monolithic voting block for the Democrats. But the teachers demand and get bang for their buck. Their bang is their own self-interest, advocated by a union.
The Democratic party represents the teacher’s interests under threat of union duress.
The union represents the teachers.
The children don’t have a union. When children pay union dues they will have aggressive union representation.
Who represents the children’s interests? Do you think it’s the government?
The government represents the government’s interests, not the children’s interests. At every level of government this means self-perpetuation. Government programs are often initiated but rarely cut.
The method of government self-perpetuation is to change government by the people, to government by the government. A method of this is to control the educational curricula and content. Feds have a big stick over local and state government. The feds say do as we say or no soup for you.
Most times locals looking to get re-elected prefer the federal soup with cheese on top. The alternative method to fat supplemental federal dollars that locals use to finance the high school aquatic parks and athletic fields/running tracks not made of dirt and cinders is to jack up the taxes yet again. This makes the politician unpopular, which is the death-knoll for politicians at the local level. Yet we must have the computers and excellent facilities to keep up with the Joneses in the next county.
However, on Mt. Olympus the members of Congress, acting in their own self-interest, rely on base-line budgeting to absolve them from the notorious unpopularity caused by voting yes to taxes. But even that's not set in stone these days with the idiocy of voters. I saw some politician promising to raise taxes and the obligatory live applause machine in attendance was ecstatic. Their applause was monolithic.
