By Darrel Deide
Chairman, Idahoans for Choice in Education
This year marks my 50th year in Idaho education as a teacher, counselor, administrator, legislator and advocate. I taught science in the 1959-1960 school year, the year that the microchip was invented, the year that the first rocket escaped Earth’s gravity and the year the Mercury program launched Sam the Monkey into outer space.
Ronald Reagan once quipped that a government agency “is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Government just doesn’t contract as readily as it grows, even in the face of adversity, competing demands or changing times. Government bureaucrats and the elected officials who employ them would rather add programs or raise taxes than get rid of something less important or no longer needed.
Idaho taxpayers employ the equivalent of more than 27,000 full-time workers in the state's public school system. Of those, about 55 percent are teachers - a decrease of about 5 percent of the pie since the state implemented its school funding law in 1994. On the surface, that's not so troubling. But the problem is the burgeoning fleet of non-teacher staff flooding the ranks of school employees. Over the last 15 years, the state has added administrators and other school employees at a much faster clip than teachers or students.
Right now, odds are, someone in Idaho is living a precariously hedonistic life, and government really needs to step in and save this oaf before he, like, dies or something.
When government officials don’t return your phone calls, won’t follow the public records law and won’t follow their own internal policies, you tend to be a wee bit suspicious of their self-congratulatory claims of openness.
Bonneville Joint School District No. 93 has become the only government agency in the state to deny the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s request to receive a copy of district spending records, even though state law says the district must provide it.
Liberals are ‘dismayed’ at what senior executives of the country’s largest companies are paid and the way they seem to waste money on themselves at the ‘expense of the shareholders’ and are morally outraged when harebrained ‘shareholder measures’ are given little consideration when brought to the floor during annual corporate meetings. Therefore they and President Obama feel obligated to protect little ole me, the chartered financial analyst, and my investments from rapacious senior executives.
Today, I’m posting the email exchange between the Idaho Freedom Foundation and Owyhee County Prosecutor Douglas Emery. I’ve decided to do that because I want to show people what happens when a county refuses to provide public information. After you read the emails, read my update on what’s happened since the email exchange that got us to this point:
The defenders of bad tax policy justify bad tax policy by pointing out that someone else is paying the tax that provides the benefit that the rest of us enjoy. In government, we call that a fiscal solution. In the parlance of the common folk, it's known as theft. How else can you define taking something that doesn't belong to you and using it for your own benefit?
Owyhee County has spent more than $162,000 on something so obviously wonderful, it just has to be kept secret from taxpayers. So the county took a black marker and diligently crossed out 56 entries on a 240-page check register provided to the Idaho Freedom Foundation. County Prosecutor Douglas Emery decided the recipients of the taxpayer dollars - of which he's one - should remain anonymous.
The theory behind President Obama’s massive spending program is that by throwing a trillion dollars against the wall, somehow all that will lead to enough of an increase in the demand for goods and services out in the great beyond so that both a rise in unemployment and a decline in aggregate GDP can be avoided. This is basic Keynesian economics and assumes that recessions are the result of insufficient consumer demand, thus the government needs to spend to whatever extent necessary to offset that deficiency.
