Where will inflation stop?

APEowner said:

Boost_Crazy said:

...I saw time and time again that more budget equals better education. There is zero evidence to support that...

There are multiple studies that support the assertion that generally speaking more funding leads to better student outcomes.  You can argue that funding doesn't always improve student outcomes or, that funding needs to be applied approprietly and that the metrics used for evaluation need to be appropriet for the funding but your assertion that there's no evidence that there's no evidence that improved funding improves education is patently untrue. 

That's not to say that there aren't cases of coruption, incompitance and fraud in education.  There are and they need to be delt with.  However, they need to be delt with independently of funding. 

Like most of the problems that the country and the world face, this is a complicated topic.  The studies themselves are a slog to get through and it's a lot of reading.  If you want a good summary NPR did a great series on this topic Link to first artical in series

We'll said; one mans waste is another's real need.  There are communities where the tax base isn't there to afford a proper education.   Good teachers avoid teaching there because their efforts won't be rewarded.  
Not just poor minority dominant urban areas either.  Rural areas where hard working people just can't squeeze a decent living no matter how hard they work  or what sacrifices are made.

aircooled said:

One potential change in housing are the changes and potential changes in China.  Their imperious all knowing leader Poo Bear seems to have discovered that they are a communist country and their wild differentiation between rich and poor doesn't really jive with that groove man. It's looking like they are considering someone storing their huge piles of money in another country (e.g. real estate) a not very commie thing to do (I think it is no longer allowed). Heck, owning any land ain't exactly Lenin approved. Other, rather extreme social "good commie" dictates seems to be being pushed also and likely more to come.

There are apparently two rather large Chinese owned apartment / condo buildings for sale in LA.  Maybe more to come? I know there is also a lot of Chinese investments in Canada also (which also has a huge housing affordability problem).

Please understand the difference between China and Chinese. 
 Few Chinese are communists.  
    However even those who are communists don't like everything the government does Just like here in America.  
    A lot of Chinese individuals own property in America. ( and Canada etc around the world)

They  own it for the profit potential and as a safety net so when things really do fall abort they have a golden parachute. 

Yes, I am well aware of that.  I don't THINK I implied otherwise in the post.  

The primary point is that the Grand Leader appears to be very much trying to rein in the "non communist" activities that his countryman, who in many cases, are very intent in doing.

In fact I believe, as you state, there really are not that many communists in China (why they are doing these things of course), BUT if you want any position in government or the military, you HAVE to be (or at least be good at pretending).  And of course, they all ARE living under a communist regime (even if it has wandered wildly from communism in many areas).  Having huge piles of money and holding real estate in other countries is not (should not be) kosher in a communist state.

A good note, and realistically probably not likely, is that these new and upcoming commandments might create a backlash (revolt?) within the masses (especially those with money).  Of course, we are dealing with a regime that was very willing to run previous protesters over with tanks and squish them into a mush that could be flushed down the sewers!

Boost_Crazy said:

...I saw time and time again that more budget equals better education. There is zero evidence to support that...

There are multiple studies that support the assertion that, generally speaking, more funding leads to better student outcomes.  You can argue that funding doesn't always improve student outcomes or, that funding needs to be applied appropriately and that the metrics used for evaluation need to be appropriate for the funding bu,t your assertion that there's no evidence that improved funding improves education is patently untrue. 

That's not to say that there aren't cases of corruption, incompetence and fraud in education.  There are and they need to be dealt with.  However, they need to be dealt with independently of funding. 

Like most of the problems that the US (and the world face) this is a complicated topic.  The studies themselves are a slog to get through and it's a lot of reading.  If you want a good summary NPR did a great series on this topic Link to first artical in series

I think you missed my point, but demonstrated it for me perfectly. Of course funding makes a difference, but not just blindly increasing finding. Sure, if you add $10 million to the budget, and 10% of that goes to something beneficial, you might get a net gain. But that is not a win! Instead  of spending an extra $10 million to get the $1 that made the difference- how about just spend that $1 million? Better yet, find that $1 million in the waste from the rest of your budget? It's like having a car with worn tires, fixing it by buying a new car, and congratulating yourself on a job well done. 
 

Education is a regional issue. Here in CA, teachers are well paid. They have one of if not the most powerful union in the state. It's not the money that is driving off teachers here. What Snowdoggie has mentioned in his post about the current classroom experience is happening, that is what is driving away teachers, not lack of funding. 

Here is a good example of money literally going in the garbage at my kid's school. We live in a nice neighborhood. The school is surrounded by nice neighborhoods. I would be shocked to learn that a single child going to that school has parents that are unable it feed them. Yet they have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and summer vacation food programs. But, surprise, they had very few kids make use of the program. Did they cut it back? No, they expanded it. They decided that the problem was that kids who needed it were embarrassed to ask, so they extended it to every student automatically! The food is horrible, so still little takers. So they started to hand the food out to kids, whether they wanted it or not-it promptly went in the garbage. I'm pretty sure that money could be better spent elsewhere, but they are doing such a good job using up their budget to fill trash cans, I'm sure they will get a bump next year. 

aircooled said:

Yes, I am well aware of that.  I don't THINK I implied otherwise in the post.  

The primary point is that the Grand Leader appears to be very much trying to rein in the "non communist" activities that his countryman, who in many cases, are very intent in doing.

In fact I believe, as you state, there really are not that many communists in China (why they are doing these things of course), BUT if you want any position in government or the military, you HAVE to be (or at least be good at pretending).  And of course, they all ARE living under a communist regime (even if it has wandered wildly from communism in many areas).  Having huge piles of money and holding real estate in other countries is not (should not be) kosher in a communist state.

A good note, and realistically probably not likely, is that these new and upcoming commandments might create a backlash (revolt?) within the masses (especially those with money).  Of course, we are dealing with a regime that was very willing to run previous protesters over with tanks and squish them into a mush that could be flushed down the sewers!

The Chinese opened their housing to the free market and ended up with empty cities full of luxury condos that most people in China can't afford. They are still trying to figure out what to do with that. Then Chinese citizens with money are buying houses in the West, sending their kids to school at UCLA and making escape plans instead of investing their money in China to create jobs. I don't think the government over there will put up with that for very long. Something has to give.

....which is also a chunk (not all, just one of the chunks) of why housing in some markets is wildly expensive: speculation by investors who want to park their money somewhere safe.

Boost_Crazy said:

....So they started to hand the food out to kids, whether they wanted it or not-it promptly went in the garbage. I'm pretty sure that money could be better spent elsewhere, but they are doing such a good job using up their budget to fill trash cans, I'm sure they will get a bump next year. 

I can confirm a very similar story.  My wife's nephew works in special ed (was in CA, as since moved out of state.... I think you can figure that out for yourself) they provide snacks for the kids.  They are require (by some rule) to provide healthy options.  The ultimate result of that is that he would bring home large amounts of apples broccoli and carrots, which would otherwise just be tossed in the garbage (I am pretty sure he was not supposed to bring it home BTW).

I told him I wanted to create a cartoon for the local paper when they do their next teacher layoff.  The cartoon would be two teachers talking in the parking lot of the new district building (same campus as the special ed program).  The caption would be "Hopefully we can avoid getting laid off, the supervisors are in there right now trying to figure out WHERE all the money in the district is going!?!"  The cartoon would show a sign on the building about how shiny and new the admin building is and of course the parking lot is full of Mercedes and Tesla. 

He parked in the same parking lot as the supervisors, and yes, it was filled with Teslas and Mercedes and the like. 

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Then Chinese citizens with money are buying houses in the West, sending their kids to school at UCLA and making escape plans instead of investing their money in China to create jobs. I don't think the government over there will put up with that for very long. Something has to give.

It's been going on in B.C. since Hong Kong was given back to China, no sign of it stopping either.

The Fed announced the beginning of a taper yesterday, and Powell sounded slightly less convinced that inflation would be as transitory as he thought. The market mostly shrugged. And check out that graph of the balance sheet! The Fed took massive action (in comparison to it's previous efforts anyhow) at the beginning of the pandemic.

https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/with-bond-buying-taper-bag-fed-turns-wary-eye-inflation-2021-11-03/

To PHeller's question a while back about "What is a good course of action in a high-inflation environment?" Yes, paying off debt later with money that is worth less b/c of inflation is one idea...assuming that the value of the underlying asset keeps pace with inflation. Another is having a business or skillset where you can rapidly raise your prices. If inflation is at 5% next year and you're only getting a 3% raise, you're  actually getting a pay-cut, assuming that you spend money on things that the Fed uses in it's inflation calculator.

Boost_Crazy said:

Here is a good example of money literally going in the garbage at my kid's school. We live in a nice neighborhood. The school is surrounded by nice neighborhoods. I would be shocked to learn that a single child going to that school has parents that are unable it feed them. Yet they have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and summer vacation food programs. But, surprise, they had very few kids make use of the program. Did they cut it back? No, they expanded it. They decided that the problem was that kids who needed it were embarrassed to ask, so they extended it to every student automatically! The food is horrible, so still little takers. So they started to hand the food out to kids, whether they wanted it or not-it promptly went in the garbage. I'm pretty sure that money could be better spent elsewhere, but they are doing such a good job using up their budget to fill trash cans, I'm sure they will get a bump next year. 

Even being taken at a low rate means they have a need to meet. There is often more to the story than meets the eye.

My understanding is that the food health and security program, and its expansion, that you're probably talking about is federally backed and not a drain on any of the individual schools (or the districts) other resources. In fact, I believe the schools/districts actually make money on every meal, to cover the overhead involved administering it, so the reason they're probably pushing the meals is to not lose out on that resource helping fund their food services department. It sounds like people not "in need" utilizing this service when it was opened to all children under 18 during the programs large COVID expansion, was a significant part of what helped keep the food services people in our district employed while the schools were shut down.

Problem with throwing money at things is, a cost / benefit analysis is never done.

When a company does that, there are consequences. Not so much with government.

Boost_Crazy said:

Boost_Crazy said:

...I saw time and time again that more budget equals better education. There is zero evidence to support that...

There are multiple studies that support the assertion that, generally speaking, more funding leads to better student outcomes.  You can argue that funding doesn't always improve student outcomes or, that funding needs to be applied appropriately and that the metrics used for evaluation need to be appropriate for the funding bu,t your assertion that there's no evidence that improved funding improves education is patently untrue. 

That's not to say that there aren't cases of corruption, incompetence and fraud in education.  There are and they need to be dealt with.  However, they need to be dealt with independently of funding. 

Like most of the problems that the US (and the world face) this is a complicated topic.  The studies themselves are a slog to get through and it's a lot of reading.  If you want a good summary NPR did a great series on this topic Link to first artical in series

I think you missed my point, but demonstrated it for me perfectly. Of course funding makes a difference, but not just blindly increasing finding. Sure, if you add $10 million to the budget, and 10% of that goes to something beneficial, you might get a net gain. But that is not a win! Instead  of spending an extra $10 million to get the $1 that made the difference- how about just spend that $1 million? Better yet, find that $1 million in the waste from the rest of your budget? It's like having a car with worn tires, fixing it by buying a new car, and congratulating yourself on a job well done. 
 

Education is a regional issue. Here in CA, teachers are well paid. They have one of if not the most powerful union in the state. It's not the money that is driving off teachers here. What Snowdoggie has mentioned in his post about the current classroom experience is happening, that is what is driving away teachers, not lack of funding. 

Here is a good example of money literally going in the garbage at my kid's school. We live in a nice neighborhood. The school is surrounded by nice neighborhoods. I would be shocked to learn that a single child going to that school has parents that are unable it feed them. Yet they have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and summer vacation food programs. But, surprise, they had very few kids make use of the program. Did they cut it back? No, they expanded it. They decided that the problem was that kids who needed it were embarrassed to ask, so they extended it to every student automatically! The food is horrible, so still little takers. So they started to hand the food out to kids, whether they wanted it or not-it promptly went in the garbage. I'm pretty sure that money could be better spent elsewhere, but they are doing such a good job using up their budget to fill trash cans, I'm sure they will get a bump next year. 

I’m sorry.  I thought your point was that there was zero evidence to support the statement that more budget equals better education.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. There is zero evidence that increasing the budget alone will result in better education. The money needs to go to items that will benefit education. If you just throw it into the same wasteful pot, you won't be any farther ahead then you were. For every study that shows more money helps, there is another that says that it doesn't. I argue that if there is a lot of waste in the current budget, targeting the existing waste would make a greater difference in education Vs. just throwing more money at the problem. The problem isn't the budget, it's how it is managed. 

In reply to Driven5 :

Even being taken at a low rate means they have a need to meet. There is often more to the story than meets the eye.
 

This is the root of most of our budget problems. Just because there is a need or benefit, it doesn't justify a solution with no cost spared. The money is not infinite, it has to come at the expense of some other program, from the tax payer, or debt, which contributes to inflation. 

ShawnG said:

Problem with throwing money at things is, a cost / benefit analysis is never done.

When a company does that, there are consequences. Not so much with government.

There are constant cost/benefit analyses being done on money in education but there are many challenges to that.

One is the huge number of variables.  It's pretty easy to tell how much a new piece of manufacturing equipment is going to reduce production cost. It’s a lot harder to tell how much replacing the 40-year-old, inefficient HVAC system that smells like dead fish whenever it runs is going to help with test scores.

It’s also hard to evaluate how much waste is acceptable.  School meal programs are a great example.  Studies have shown that the percentage of kids that need the meal programs and take advantage of them goes up when the meals are offered to everyone.  As Boost_Crazy has noticed that certainly results in waste.  How many kids need to benefit from the program to make it worthwhile?  1, 1%, 50%.  I don’t know and I’m glad I don’t have to make that call.

Boost_Crazy said:

Sorry, I should have been more clear. There is zero evidence that increasing the budget alone will result in better education. The money needs to go to items that will benefit education. If you just throw it into the same wasteful pot, you won't be any farther ahead then you were. For every study that shows more money helps, there is another that says that it doesn't. I argue that if there is a lot of waste in the current budget, targeting the existing waste would make a greater difference in education Vs. just throwing more money at the problem. The problem isn't the budget, it's how it is managed. 

Supposedly with local control of the schools the budget is allocated to the area with the greatest need.  Which is why Football and basketball are always so well funded.  
     The truth is the people running the schools, local school boards tend to rubber stamp items they support and object strongly to complex, difficult to understand long term programs that might make a real difference to the school. 
  Then there are controversial  things like masking,  teacher tenure, and religion that often turn school board meetings into a shouting match 

In reply to APEowner :

Well, let's make an educated guess. Say my kid's school has 500 students. Let's put the number of kids who's parents can't provide lunch at 5%- 1 in 20, much higher than I'd expect for the area. I'll place the cost of the lunch at $5- also likely on the low side given the specific requirements. That is $2500 per day total, to benefit 50 kids per day- $100 per needed lunch. $450k for school year. How many teachers could we hire with that money AND provide for the kids that need it?

If anyone has the real numbers, I'd love to see them. I'm betting I'm low.

In reply to Boost_Crazy :

Perhaps you should stop and do 30 seconds actual research for yourself to at least make a minimally informed opinion, rather than just looking for things you have zero knowledge of to try to be outraged about. 

From what I'm seeing, the average cost to prepare a school lunch is $3.81. The average federal subsidy for that lunch is $3.32. You're outraged over LESS THAN $0.50 per meal out of pocket to provide an essential service, and I don't think that even accounts for the COVID expansion of the program. I'd bet that has less waste impact compared to the food they throw away in the natural course of food services, completely unrelated to the free lunch program, and is certainly a drop in the bucket of the annual budget. Do you really still think that free meal for underprivileged kids is the best place to focus your self-righteous indignation? LOL

In reply to Driven5 :

Did you not see EDUCATED GUESS in the first line? And my $5 EDUCATED GUESS is probably pretty close if your average cost is correct at $3.81 per meal. If you did a little research, you would find that nothing is average cost in California. But since we are picking nits, let's run the numbers. That would be ONLY $38.10 per meal for each kid that actually needs it, what a bargain! 
 

FYI, I did some research- it's not easy to find good numbers, especially on a local level. The first results are the estimated costs of the program, statewide. Of course, the estimates are usually way off, so the next numbers jump, when you get to the actual costs. Estimates for "free" meals go up to $650,000,000 for a year state wide. I'm sure a teacher's salary or two could be squeezed out of that number without affecting kids in need. 
 

Do you really still think the lunchroom is the best place to focus your self-righteous indignation? 

I don't think you know what those words mean. If you did, you wouldn't have used them, and certainly not after the paragraph you wrote. Pot calling kettle...

If you wanted to know why I chose that example of wasteful spending, all you had to do was ask. There certainly are plenty of  other examples. But I thought, surely this is an obvious example that no one would disagree with. Why, it was brought to my attention by my 7 year old second grader. He did his own informal audit. They made him take gross food that he didn't need or want. He saw garbage cans full of wasted food, and thought maybe it wasn't the best use of resources. I thought if a 7 year old could understand that, anyone could. 

In reply to Driven5 :

That federal subsidy doesn't just appear out of thin air, either.  Those are taxpayer dollars either way.

And he's not taking exception to the meal program. He's objecting to the waste created by forcing meals on everyone even though most are thrown away, in some misguided effort to reduce an imagined stigma.

Re the meal thing: You would be surprised at how many kids, even in seemingly nice areas, get their only meal of the day at school. It is obviously very location dependent, but it is much larger than you would expect. 

In reply to Duke :

'Taxpayer' dollars, yes. Local taxpayer dollars that can be converted into teachers, as repeatedly stated/implied, no.

In reply to Boost_Crazy :

As an admission to being the kettle, go ahead and call me the pot. I guess I tend to reply a bit sharply when people try to prove a point by creating hypothetical examples that baselessly ignore key information that was just provided, like the fact that most to all of the free meal funding is provided through a mechanism completely independent of teacher funding.

Sure everything costs above average in CA, but the reimbursement is above average in CA too. As I see it, the feds look to kick in $3.68, and the state is funding the rest of the way up to $4.32. So with that state extra on top of the federal program, out of pocket to the schools should be minimal. The reason that the state budget for free meals balloons in the second year is not because of bad estimating, but because the $53M in the first year only needs to go above and beyond what the feds provide, while subsequent years are wholly state funded. Sure $650M sounds big in absolute terms, but is a mere 0.25% of the states $262B education budget. So yeah, as imperfect as it might be, that's still looking for waste in all the wrong places. The federal money is USDA, so there is zero correlation to being able to convert it to be used for teachers. Perhaps the state money could have been, but the data behind this program apparently shows it to be something valuable enough to receive unanimous bi-partisan support.

I don't know where $38.10 is coming from, because $0.50 * 500 * 5% = $12.5 per needed meal cost to the school/district budget that teachers are hired from... Not cheap, but nowhere near as bad as you are trying to make it out to be. The data collected due to the series of events driven by the pandemic response also demonstrated that far fewer people in need were taking free school lunches than actually needed them. And again, the CA is (unanimous, bi-partisan supported) going above and beyond the USDA funding to close that gap even further, bringing the per needed meal cost to the school down down that much further.

Now let's also clarify the interpretations of a 7 year old 2nd grader. Was the lunch 'forced' upon them at the beginning of the lunch period, or was it a distribution of the excess afterword? Has it been 'forced' upon every single student on every day of the school year so far, or been short-term intermittent and tapered off?

The way the program was designed to reduce the stigma is by offering the same meal options to all students, free of charge... Not force every student to take a school provided meal at the start of lunch every day. However, in order to ensure there is enough food for every student that asks for it, there will always necessarily be some amount of daily excess. This is true completely regardless of whether or not it's purchased by the students or provided free to them. The main difference with starting up a free meal program is that demand will initially be relatively unknown compared to historical data. The result of this, will be an unsustainable amount of excess early on in the program. As the program matures the excess will be able to steadily decrease to a more sustainable level, as the demand becomes much more predictable. Regardless, the gross excess can be either all thrown away so that nobody can benefit from it, or all given away after lunch is over to take home so that at least some can still get further benefit from it even if most is still thrown away. Which is truly more wasteful?

Someone above stated teachers are well paid in some areas. 
 

im gonna say even with the supposedly good pay in those areas, I'll still say they are underpaid.  No way I'm dealing with these nut job parents. 
 

My wife had a parent tell her that ky wife can't get vaccinated against covid because her being near their child would destroy the child's dna. 
 

nope nope nope nope. 

Driven5 said:

In reply to Duke :

'Taxpayer' dollars, yes. Local taxpayer dollars that can be converted into teachers, as repeatedly stated/implied, no.

If fewer tax dollars are sent to Washington, where they get passed around like a bottle of Thunderbird and sent back to us much reduced and full of backwash, then more tax dollars can be spent at a local level on specific programs that meet specific needs in specific communities.

Fueled by Caffeine said:

Someone above stated teachers are well paid in some areas. 
 

im gonna say even with the supposedly good pay in those areas, I'll still say they are underpaid.  No way I'm dealing with these nut job parents. 
 

My wife had a parent tell her that ky wife can't get vaccinated against covid because her being near their child would destroy the child's dna. 
 

nope nope nope nope. 

We have teachers my age dying of Covid. We have teachers and school board members getting threatened by parents. We have parents showing up at schools with guns. As far as I am concerned I will stay out of my mother's and grandmother's profession , and they can all teach their own kids while I will continue to hide out at home and away from the lot of them.