Public Education Is Not A Republican Priority

Falling housing prices, lower tax revenues are forcing state, local governments and school boards to cut expenses. Towns are turning off the neighborhood street lights, closing pools, playgrounds, parks, and libraries, limiting the distance a police car can drive in a day or sit idling. Fire stations are being closed, or rotating fire department station closing from day to day which Philadelphia is doing (three different stations in the day and three in the evening). Roads badly needing repaving are not only not being repaved, but towns and counties are taking the cheaper option of removing the asphalt and turning the road back into a low cost maintenance gravel road.

With schools across the country opening this month, 116,000+ teachers who were in the classroom last year have been told that their positions were eliminated as if there were not funding. Today the Democrats House of Representatives with the support of a handful of Republicans passed a bill which the President signed three hours later to save teachers jobs.

The same bill provides four months of Medicaid expenses for medical expenses of those who are low-income and the unemployed. States would be funding Medicaid without federal funding but in the process states would be laying off tens of thousands of fire fighters and police officers. The funding allows States to provide medical care without laying-off public safety personnel.

It would seem that the bill would have strong Republican support. Instead the Republican leadership said keeping teachers employed was a waste of money. One Republican leader pontificated that schools, local and state governments have been blotted for decades and it is time to downsize them all and thereby once again demonstrating that the Republican championing that they are compassionate conservatives is disingenuous and empty marketing. The Republicans politicians and their dominant deep pocket contributors are more than happy to substantially increase public school class sizes while sending their own children to private schools. For a party that boasts to be the party of Lincoln, this position is a far cry from where Lincoln stood on education...though he was self educated he advocated for a strong public education system for all citizens.

To keep police on the street, the majority of the Republicans in the House would have been happier to remove the expectation that States are required to fund Medicare and care for their poor citizens so are not concerned about healthcare of the common worker.

The costs of the bill are being paid by closing loop-holes that have allowed American based companies not to have to pay taxes on money earned oversees which the average citizen is not allowed to do and which have encouraged them to move jobs to other countries. By calling this bill a wasteful special interest bill the Republicans are indicating that they lack of interest in the needs and priorities of the middle class.

I am one independent voter who is quickly seeing that the Republican Party party is not fit to govern, that regardless of what their slogans and soundbits may claim, they lacks compassion for the blight of the avearage citizen and undermining the value and strength of the middle class.