I officially live in the twilight zone

Louisiana halted TOPS (free college)program

The newly elected Democratic Governor of Louisiana threatens to cut the state's " Free College" programs to balance the budget and the LAGOP and conservatives are going nuts. Republicans are ready to toss Edwards out of office for cutting a social spending program. You could swear Louisiana is a Bernie Sanders rally right now!

I'm in the Twilight Zone too...

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I think it's a ploy to get students behind a tax increase.

“The budget problems created by the previous administration do have the potential to hurt students directly,” he said. “Next year, as it stands, TOPS is only funded 25 percent, unless the legislature acts to change that. This means fewer TOPS scholarships will be awarded next year. That is why it is so important for the legislature to work with me to balance this budget and prevent future cuts to the TOPS Scholarship Program.”

LOFSA Executive Director Sujuan Boutte said Friday that TOPS payments will continue to schools but only up to the 80 percent that they are funded. TOPS was overbudget by $28 million, which Edwards’ administration said will have to be absorbed by the schools.

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Current students lose nothing. There's just a threat of fewer new scholarships.

“TOPS is subject to legislative appropriation. The Governor has no authority to cut TOPS. Even if Gov. Edwards uses his unilateral authority to reduce the State General Fund by 3% and statutory dedications by 5%, the legislature can appropriate money in a supplemental bill in the regular session to fully fund TOPS. The Governor may line item veto it, but the legislature will override that veto,” Mills said.

For his part, Edwards did not suggest cutting TOPS, but he said it was not fully funded and he hoped the Legislature would work to change that.

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Cutting education, a surefire way to not get re-elected.

Carjosse said:

Cutting education, a surefire way to not get re-elected.

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If the state is in need of funds, freeing up free education is a great option. Unfortunately too many citizens have been trained to think only, "What can my various governments GIVE me?". Getting these types of benefits are great when you can afford them. People should also be educated to understand that if the money isn't there, its best to give up gubmint freebies than go into financial ruin, or keep increasing taxes to the point where students have to move out of state to find a job once they get their "free education" because all the businesses moved out due to high taxes.

well, the legislature could eliminate funding for maintenance of the state's infrastructure, instead


ooops. already did that

Juggernaut said:

Louisiana halted TOPS (free college)program

The newly elected Democratic Governor of Louisiana threatens to cut the state's " Free College" programs to balance the budget and the LAGOP and conservatives are going nuts. Republicans are ready to toss Edwards out of office for cutting a social spending program. You could swear Louisiana is a Bernie Sanders rally right now!

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When Bernie Sanders went there, he got a crowd of ~6,000. That rivaled places like Cleveland and elsewhere that are openly liberal. Honestly, I'm not surprised that people in the South are tired of getting stuck from the man. They thought "the man" was just the rich, elitist assholes in New York and California. Eventually, they're going to figure out the real rich, elitist assholes that are putting them down are the ones in their own states and the ones who also have an R next to their name. This sounds like a healthy start.

(And yes, Sanders 2016!)

FieldTheorist said:

When Bernie Sanders went there, he got a crowd of ~6,000. That rivaled places like Cleveland and elsewhere that are openly liberal. Honestly, I'm not surprised that people in the South are tired of getting stuck from the man. They thought "the man" was just the rich, elitist assholes in New York and California. Eventually, they're going to figure out the real rich, elitist assholes that are putting them down are the ones in their own states and the ones who also have an R next to their name. This sounds like a healthy start.

(And yes, Sanders 2016!)

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And how are these mythical creatures putting them down?

Carjosse said:

Cutting education, a surefire way to not get re-elected.

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unless you live in Indiana. Daniels cut education by hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Republicans held onto the office just fine. not only that, but also..............

























Daniels is now president of Purdue University.

here's the super fun part : he cut education to fill a budget shortfall that didn't even exist in the first place. it was a computer glitch that hid half a billion dollars in revenue. whoops.

idiots.

FieldTheorist said:

When Bernie Sanders went there, he got a crowd of ~6,000. That rivaled places like Cleveland and elsewhere that are openly liberal. Honestly, I'm not surprised that people in the South are tired of getting stuck from the man. They thought "the man" was just the rich, elitist assholes in New York and California. Eventually, they're going to figure out the real rich, elitist assholes that are putting them down are the ones in their own states and the ones who also have an R next to their name. This sounds like a healthy start.

(And yes, Sanders 2016!)

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The devil you know (local politijerks) is better than the devil you don't (everyone else who makes fun of us for being different).

Helix said:

unless you live in Indiana. Daniels cut education by hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Republicans held onto the office just fine. not only that, but also..............

























Daniels is now president of Purdue University.

here's the super fun part : he cut education to fill a budget shortfall that didn't even exist in the first place. it was a computer glitch that hid half a billion dollars in revenue. whoops.

idiots.

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Your seem to have forgotten that he has also held the Tuition rates pretty stable at Purdue.

Perhaps he's only trying to pay the best price for the product.

Purdue to "Freeze" Tuition for Two Years - FacultyRow
<snip>
The gist of the news is this: Current base tuition for Indiana and non-Indiana resident students will remain at current levels until the end of the 2014-15 school year on the West Lafayette campus. This will be the first time in 37 years Purdue has not increased tuition going into a new budget cycle.
“I have found a broad consensus among faculty and staff to put the interests of our students and their families first,” Daniels said in a statement.
<snip>

As Mona Lisa Vito said, "Omigod! what a f------ nightmare!"

code1211 said:

Your seem to have forgotten that he has also held the Tuition rates pretty stable at Purdue.

Perhaps he's only trying to pay the best price for the product.

Purdue to "Freeze" Tuition for Two Years - FacultyRow
<snip>
The gist of the news is this: Current base tuition for Indiana and non-Indiana resident students will remain at current levels until the end of the 2014-15 school year on the West Lafayette campus. This will be the first time in 37 years Purdue has not increased tuition going into a new budget cycle.
“I have found a broad consensus among faculty and staff to put the interests of our students and their families first,” Daniels said in a statement.
<snip>

As Mona Lisa Vito said, "Omigod! what a f------ nightmare!"

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it was a ****ing nightmare, and an unnecessary one. schools closed, good teachers got fired, and all because :

Indiana state government unearths $320 million in unknown tax revenue - CNNPolitics.com

well, that, and because Republicans in Indiana don't like public schools and have been doing everything they can to privatize them for years.

How were things under Bobby Jindal's Louisiana?

Helix said:

it was a ****ing nightmare, and an unnecessary one. schools closed, good teachers got fired, and all because :

Indiana state government unearths $320 million in unknown tax revenue - CNNPolitics.com

well, that, and because Republicans in Indiana don't like public schools and have been doing everything they can to privatize them for years.

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I recently moved out of Franklin Township in Indianapolis.

I grew up in Duluth Minnesota, home of the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

The University of Minnesota Bulldogs were the Division 2 Football National Champions in 2008 and 2010.

The geniuses who are teaching the poor victims of their tender mercies at the Franklin Township High School decided to build a football stadium that makes the field and bleachers for the UMD 2 time National Champions look meager.

They then demanded more money to support their system because the costs of the football stadium were just too much. What a gang of idiots!

Their request received not only a "no" from the outraged residents of Franklin Township, but a "Hell no"!

As a result, they were forced to try to declare that busing to school was not a needed part of education. Actually getting to school is not a critical part of going to school according to these morons!

They were forced to re-instate the school bus program. They have now had to close three of the schools that they used to maintain in the township. They still own them. They are just sitting idle.

These are simply idiots who have no clue as to what they need to be doing or how they should be doing it.

Throwing more dollars at a system run by the retarded is not the solution.

It stuns me to know how inept our public servants are. There are a very few occasions when they are revealed for the wasteful incompetents that they really are. Are we to assume that the occasional peeks behind the curtain revealing their utter stupidity are the isolated exceptions?

This little example on this little occasion is one. The idiot in the bath tub in Vegas. How many folks have taken the Fifth recently due to their abuse of the system and theft of our rights and dollars?

code1211 said:

I recently moved out of Franklin Township in Indianapolis.

I grew up in Duluth Minnesota, home of the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

The University of Minnesota Bulldogs were the Division 2 Football National Champions in 2008 and 2010.

The geniuses who are teaching the poor victims of their tender mercies at the Franklin Township High School decided to build a football stadium that makes the field and bleachers for the UMD 2 time National Champions look meager. They then demanded more money to support their system because the costs of the football stadium were just too much. What a gang of idiots!

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i don't agree with spending education dollars on lavish stadiums, and i'm not arguing for that. if you want to start a thread about wasting tax money on sports stadiums, i'm sure that we'll be on the same page. however, where i live, no stadiums were built, but one school was closed right after a renovation. it was promptly sold to a local corporation for bottom dollar.

code1211 said:

Their request received not only a "no" from the outraged residents of Franklin Township, but a "Hell no"!

As a result, they were forced to try to declare that busing to school was not a needed part of education. Actually getting to school is not a critical part of going to school according to these morons!

They were forced to re-instate the school bus program. They have now had to close three of the schools that they used to maintain in the township. They still own them. They are just sitting idle.

These are simply idiots who have no clue as to what they need to be doing or how they should be doing it.

Throwing more dollars at a system run by the retarded is not the solution.

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neither is privatizing the whole thing and selling it to for profit entities. and worse than that, purposely undercutting the public system so that it fails. and yeah, that's what they are doing in Indiana.

code1211 said:

It stuns me to know how inept our public servants are. There are a very few occasions when they are revealed for the wasteful incompetents that they really are. Are we to assume that the occasional peeks behind the curtain revealing their utter stupidity are the isolated exceptions?

This little example on this little occasion is one. The idiot in the bath tub in Vegas. How many folks have taken the Fifth recently due to their abuse of the system and theft of our rights and dollars?

Click to expand...

the fact remains that Daniels cut education by hundreds of millions of dollars to fill a budget shortfall that didn't even exist. then he transitioned to a cushy job running Purdue university. seems like losing half a billion dollars for years might disqualify him, but apparently not.

ocean515 said:

And how are these mythical creatures putting them down?

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I don't know, I didn't talk of any mythical creatures. I was discussing the politicians who implement neoliberal policies and other intense forms of class warfare on their own states --i.e. the Louisiana politicians who tore apart a free college initiative. But that's just the tip of the neoliberal iceberg: Refusing to expand medicaid paid for by the Federal government under the ACA, which leaves millions of US citizens in the Midwest and South from getting healthcare that they're literally paying into (through Federal taxes), keeping state taxes low and destroying social safety nets, attacking their public school systems through NCLB-like policies that damage schools in poor districts, etc. It hurts poor whites as much as it hurts poor blacks (or more, since there's more poor whites than poor blacks). It also damages the middle-class and decreases upward economic mobility (ability to work your way into better paying job).

Whether or not you can get past your own ideological commitments to see it, there's a real reason why Sanders' message is spreading like wildfire across the Union: It's because he's right about income inequality, money in politics, and our rigged economy --and the poor and middle-class know it. Whether the Establishment stops Sanders or not, the dam is beginning to overflow, and the rich class that's employed reverse-Marxist class warfare for the past 50 years will get every bit of what's coming to them.

Juggernaut said:

Louisiana halted TOPS (free college)program

The newly elected Democratic Governor of Louisiana threatens to cut the state's " Free College" programs to balance the budget and the LAGOP and conservatives are going nuts. Republicans are ready to toss Edwards out of office for cutting a social spending program. You could swear Louisiana is a Bernie Sanders rally right now!

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Life is a little different when you have to conform to a budget.

FieldTheorist said:

I don't know, I didn't talk of any mythical creatures. I was discussing the politicians who implement neoliberal policies and other intense forms of class warfare on their own states --i.e. the Louisiana politicians who tore apart a free college initiative. But that's just the tip of the neoliberal iceberg: Refusing to expand medicaid paid for by the Federal government under the ACA, which leaves millions of US citizens in the Midwest and South from getting healthcare that they're literally paying into (through Federal taxes), keeping state taxes low and destroying social safety nets, attacking their public school systems through NCLB-like policies that damage schools in poor districts, etc. It hurts poor whites as much as it hurts poor blacks (or more, since there's more poor whites than poor blacks). It also damages the middle-class and decreases upward economic mobility (ability to work your way into better paying job).

Whether or not you can get past your own ideological commitments to see it, there's a real reason why Sanders' message is spreading like wildfire across the Union: It's because he's right about income inequality, money in politics, and our rigged economy --and the poor and middle-class know it. Whether the Establishment stops Sanders or not, the dam is beginning to overflow, and the rich class that's employed reverse-Marxist class warfare for the past 50 years will get every bit of what's coming to them.

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LOL.

And you ask whether I can get past my ideological commitments? Your post is nothing but that from a poster boy of ideological talking points and agenda driven whimsy. I'd be a bit more reserved with your accusations while carving your own agenda driven ideological commitments into stone.

The paradise Sanders floats to the indoctrinated is most certainly resonating with some, can't argue that point. In fact it's entertaining to watch socialist progressives eat their own words as they support the old white guy, a species they have reviled up until his promise to bail out their incompetence sounded good.

ocean515 said:

LOL.

And you ask whether I can get past my ideological commitments? Your post is nothing but that from a poster boy of ideological talking points and agenda driven whimsy. I'd be a bit more reserved with your accusations while carving your own agenda driven ideological commitments into stone.

The paradise Sanders floats to the indoctrinated is most certainly resonating with some, can't argue that point. In fact it's entertaining to watch socialist progressives eat their own words as they support the old white guy, a species they have reviled up until his promise to bail out their incompetence sounded good.

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I'm back to:

*yawn*


Thanks for playing.

FieldTheorist said:

I'm back to:

*yawn*


Thanks for playing.

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I understand. Pseudo-Intellectuals run out of words when confronted with logic.

Thanks for trying.

ecofarm said:

I think it's a ploy to get students behind a tax increase.
Current students lose nothing. There's just a threat of fewer new scholarships.

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Yes, the special address does seem to be a shock and awe tactic. But, I believe it is not unwarranted. I don't think most people here realize the financial straits of the state and how that really affects them. Folks here have grown to expect "Free College", if their children meet the GPA requirements.

Phys251 said:

How were things under Bobby Jindal's Louisiana?

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The first term was great but, we were all drinking the koolaid back then and ..well... some still are. He looked like a conservative superstar because Federal Katrina and Insurance money were rolling in. The BP deepwater Horizon money started flowing in his second term. So, he got away with cutting taxes and doling out corporate incentive packages (Millions in cash + 10 year tax exemptions) like hot cakes. This went by unnoticed by the average Joe taxpayer. In his second term he looked so great, the not-old-white-guy Republican POTUS campaign started. But, then all the disaster money ran out and oil prices fell causing oil tax revenues to fall. The budget shortfalls started… year after year. He raided every piggy bank in state to plug the holes. When that wasn't enough he cut spending in the only two areas of the budget that aren't constitutionally protected, healthcare and education. Jindal, pledged to the American for Tax Reform and took a scorched earth stance on raising taxes. The millions in corporate welfare programs were never rolled back. Corporate taxes are net negative, we payout more rebates than we take in. College tuitions have gone up and the TOPS scholarship program is in jeopardy. Quite a sad situation, the state is quite literally balancing the budget on the back of students.

Healthcare is a mess. Bobby J has vehemently opposed ACA healthcare program and refused Medicare expansion. North Baton Rouge is currently an emergency healthcare desert. The charity hospital in that area, Earl K Long, closed. Then, the closet hospital, the General Midcity closed its ER because of the influx of uninsured patients. . Bobby J cut Medicaid reimbursements year after year and left the hospitals to eat it. I didn’t research this in-depth so, I’ll say “rumor has it” that during peak traffic times, it’s now a 28 mile ambulance ride to the nearest ER from downtown Baton Rouge. Besides that, 12 billion dollar back log of road/bridge maintenance, teachers /government worker haven’t had a raise in years and public schools are underfunded.

There is some good though; the film industry and solar power industry took off here because of the generous subsides. Petrochemical plants have new built facilities here. 5000 out of 250,000 students in failing school enjoy school vouchers to attend private schools.

how-bobby-jindal-wrecked-louisiana

Helix said:

i don't agree with spending education dollars on lavish stadiums, and i'm not arguing for that. if you want to start a thread about wasting tax money on sports stadiums, i'm sure that we'll be on the same page. however, where i live, no stadiums were built, but one school was closed right after a renovation. it was promptly sold to a local corporation for bottom dollar.



neither is privatizing the whole thing and selling it to for profit entities. and worse than that, purposely undercutting the public system so that it fails. and yeah, that's what they are doing in Indiana.



the fact remains that Daniels cut education by hundreds of millions of dollars to fill a budget shortfall that didn't even exist. then he transitioned to a cushy job running Purdue university. seems like losing half a billion dollars for years might disqualify him, but apparently not.

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And yet Indiana ranks in the top half nationally in performance. Not 50th.

The spending on education and the product that results are two very different and separate considerations.

In a similar discussion in the past on this forum, I did a bunch of poking around at cost per student numbers and was surprised to find that the product of education from private schools, including parochial, K-12, was much better than that of public schools. The costs were exactly reversed.

Money spent on educating the students and the actual education of the students involved seem to be either unrelated or suffer a reverse correlation.

Anyway, the ranking of Indiana primary schools is in the upper half of the country by just about any measure.

The ranking of American Schools internationally has been dropping like a stone in a pond since the birth of the Federal level Department of Education. The cost to educate each student has been rising like a rocket.

Not an American rocket, of course. we seem to be suffering problems in finding our way to the launch pad lately. Maybe our students could hitch a ride with their Russian counterparts. Seems to work for NASA.



How States Compare in the 2015 Best High Schools Rankings - US News
These Are The States With The Best And Worst School Systems, According To New Rankings
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/

code1211 said:

And yet Indiana ranks in the top half nationally in performance. Not 50th.

The spending on education and the product that results are two very different and separate considerations.

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24th by some measures, it looks like. whoopiteedee. reach for the stars. everything i posted is still factual. Indiana elected a superintendent of schools who actually supports the public system, and Pence and his buddies have done everything they can to undercut her and reduce her power.

code1211 said:

In a similar discussion in the past on this forum, I did a bunch of poking around at cost per student numbers and was surprised to find that the product of education from private schools, including parochial, K-12, was much better than that of public schools. The costs were exactly reversed.

Money spent on educating the students and the actual education of the students involved seem to be either unrelated or suffer a reverse correlation.

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****, all we had to do to fix education was to misplace half a bil and cut school funding by hundreds of millions of dollars? amazing! you've convinced me. :roll:

code1211 said:

Anyway, the ranking of Indiana primary schools is in the upper half of the country by just about any measure.

The ranking of American Schools internationally has been dropping like a stone in a pond since the birth of the Federal level Department of Education. The cost to educate each student has been rising like a rocket.

Not an American rocket, of course. we seem to be suffering problems in finding our way to the launch pad lately. Maybe our students could hitch a ride with their Russian counterparts. Seems to work for NASA.

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and that's another thread that we'll probably disagree about.