First, the Board itself has had a three week break between meetings. It's next meeting will be Monday December 7th at 7:30pm. This meeting is the Reorganization meeting where we will swear in the newly elected members of the Board and then elect the 2010 President and Vice-President. There are a few action items for the Board, one of which is to approve the Board meeting calendar for 2010.
As for the November meeting, one of the agenda items voted on was for the Districts graduation requirements. As many of you know, our students are required to do a project on a health topic in order to graduate. I suggested that we investigate what it would take to expand that project beyond just the health class. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that it would allow our students to shine with their creativity. I would not want to get rid of the health topic, but simply see what other possibilities there might be. Peter's Township recently approved a similar graduation requirement to what we have. See this article here from the Post-Gazette.
Now, on to economics. At last Thursday's Audit/Finance Committee meeting we talked a bit about the ARRA (ie, stimulus) and what it means for our district. The committee was unanimous in saying that we did not want any of this funding directed towards activities that might become perpetual in nature. It would be a mistake to take that money, start new programs or hire new staff, only to have that funding not be available to us a year from now. That would only result in a need to raise taxes or cut programs/staff down the road when the stimulus funding ended. What I found most interesting was a conversation regarding how the District was counting the "Jobs Saved/Jobs Created" numbers with regard to the ARRA. My understanding was that if we used the money to pay for staff raises, then that counts as a job saved. It is somewhat more complicated than that, but essentially, it boils down to being comical. Mind you, this is nothing that has to do with how WE do this, it has to do with how the federal government is asking us how to report the numbers. See the Wall Street Journal article on this ridiculousness here. Jobs saved is a number that does not and cannot exist. It reminded me of an essay written by an economist sometime back.
Frederic Bastiat was a French Economist in the 1800's. He wrote an essay called "That Which is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen". He is the one that came up with the "Broken Glass" theory that explores whether breaking glass to create work for the person who repairs the glass is good for the economy. His conclusion is that if the shopkeeper whose glass was broken has to pay money to fix the glass, that is money that he cannot deploy elsewhere. It destroys economic activity that is not seen and cannot be measured. He further goes on to write:
"When an official spends for his own profit an extra hundred sous, it implies that a taxpayer spends for his profit a hundred sous less. But the expense of the official is seen, because the act is performed, while that of the tax-payer is not seen, because, alas! he is prevented from performing it...The State opens a road, builds a palace, straightens a street, cuts a canal; and so gives work to certain workmen - this is what is seen: but it deprives certain other workmen of work, and this is what is not seen."
This is very much in accordance with the idea I espoused on my blog earlier when I wrote about the Aftermath of Financial Crises. The government wants to appear as if it is helping even when doing so results in the delaying of true economic recovery. Call it Bond Illusion or whatever you like, the fact is, the money we borrow today has to be paid back and it has to be paid back with interest. The hope of the politicians that keep borrowing this money is that by stimulating the economy we will simply grow by more than what we owe-that our revenues will continually expand beyond our expenses. At some point (Japan has been here for 30 years), the debt becomes so burdensome and so much of your budget goes to pay debt that there can be no more stimulating. So yes, while we can see the big highway signs that say "This Project Brought To You By ARRA Funds", we should wonder what economic activity and what other jobs were destroyed because our politicians decided to deploy capital in this manner.
Finally, I wanted to share an article I read on curriculum. This doesn't have to do specifically with Mt Lebanon but it was something that gave me a bit of perspective on how curriculum is done on a national level. Please see this article from the City Journal titled, "Who Needs Mathematicians for Math, Anyway?" I don't know how much I agree with the conclusions of the article (that we have purposely dumbed down our math for PC reasons) but I very much enjoyed the passion of the author and thought the article gave a ton of good information on things outside of just the curriculum process.
Happy Holiday, Merry Christmas, and thanks for reading.
James
