Apply This To The Dept. of Education

Understand, the responsibility for educating our children - should you and they choose to have them attend public schools - resides with the various states - working with your local community.  The United States government is not responsible in any way for educating anyone.  Yet here we have the federal government demanding that you send money to Washington so that your kids can be educated.

Huh?

That's right.  Thus, we have a situation in this country where your state government seeks and receives funds from you necessary to run our schools, and we also have the national government taking tax dollars to Washington, only to send those dollars to the same states for the same purpose.  After huge sums are skimmed off the top to pay for the Department of Education bureaucrats so that they can maintain their lavish lifestyles.

What, a sane person might ask, would happen if the middleman were cut out of the deal and we simply sent the needed funds to our state (or, better yet, our local) government?

Two things.

1) We'd save a lot of money.

2) Education won't suffer one whit.*

Keep that process in mind - the U.S. government takes money to send money where it came from originally - when you read the following:

River Hills draws scrutiny for trying to sell federal block grant
By Steve Schultze, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

River Hills, Milwaukee County's richest suburb, has found little use for what has become an annual allocation of about $20,000 in federal community development block grant money.

So village leaders instead have cut deals with other suburbs to lend or transfer the grant money and have even sought unsuccessfully to sell the River Hills block grant allocation to another community.

Those practices have drawn increased scrutiny by the county and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency in charge of the block grant program.

HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan said this week that the agency would review the River Hills practice "to see if it violates any rule or law. . . . It just strikes us as a bad idea." Sullivan, based in Washington, D.C., questioned why the county wouldn't simply transfer the money earmarked for River Hills to some other suburb or allowable use if River Hills itself had no need for the funds.

Sometimes the suburbs cut side deals, in effect borrowing from another suburb's HUD allocation.

The block grant program provides money for a range of uses, including building new sewers and streets, fixing homes and making public buildings accessible to people with disabilities. The program is aimed at helping families with low to moderate incomes. [link]

A sane person might ask why these local municipalities can't raise the necessary tax revenue on their own to pay for such projects.  Why does the federal government have to get involved?

Government types will tell you its because some communities can't afford to build new sewers and streets and the taxpayers there can't afford higher taxes.  So richer communities elsewhere must pay for their upkeep.  Even if you accept such twisted logic, why does the United States government have to insert itself into the process?  Is it because the federal government has the most guns?

None of this makes sense.

But, then, welcome to America.

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* Special note:  The U.S. Department of Education currently staffs 5,000 workers.  Its current budget is $69,900,000,000.  Since the U.S. Department of Education was created - by Jimmy Carter - in 1979, neither math scores nor reading scores have improved.