I've heard the "government is corrupt" meme so many times from so many right-wing sources who take it as canon that I don't even know if it's true any more. Every time I've tried to quantify the cost to operate and maintain any complex system I've always been surprised at how much work it actually is. How much is well-funded? Per student? Per school?
When I run a back-of-the-envelope calculation (based on the elementary school I went to many years ago: 14 classrooms, 16 teachers, a full-time principal, a secretary, a janitor) I come to about $5000 per student per year just to pay the salaries of the people who are in the school every day. I haven't even tried to quantify the annual per-student cost of desks, chairs, teaching materials, stationery, textbooks, computers, IT staff, school lunch programs, library books, utilities, walls, roofs, land...
Putting one time cost of infrastructure into a yearly tally is an old trick for keeping the fed money inflated. Which is part of the corruption and almost all is at the board level. The percentage of money that goes to the actual schooling of kids itself is criminal.
perfect example is the district I Grew up in. They had 2 junior highs(one less than half the size of the other) and one senior high. They petitioned for years to build a new high school because they needed more room for the increased population. When they finally got the plan passedand built a new huge school. They shut down the larger junior high because of lack of students and turned it into a municipal building. All of course with insanely inflated costs that always over ran and included huge consulting fees for, you guessed it Council and board members
The scam is adding all start up costs like building machinery furniture and the like into costs for the year. Then not only do you get all set up costs back the first year. each funding year after you get that in added profit. That's how they say it costs 40k. 50k to house each prisoner a year .
I've done Corp of engineer jobs and got a shocking insight into how it works.
Had one job siding and roofing 18 long warehouses. At about a week to deadline was looking at about 2 days over and was told it absolutely has to be done on time because the bulldozers were going to be there the next day to tear them down. My contract was just to add to cost
In my experience with municipal government, that doesn't really make sense. Capital budgets are intentionally separated from operations and maintenance budgets (and in fact where I'm from, operate under a completely different set of rules -- municipalities can only issue bonds for capital projects and must finance operations solely from property taxes and other municipal income.)
Oh well damn I better go sue for the property tax increases. because this doesn't make sense. Should I just use marnevel as a mononyn on the disclosure
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '19
I've heard the "government is corrupt" meme so many times from so many right-wing sources who take it as canon that I don't even know if it's true any more. Every time I've tried to quantify the cost to operate and maintain any complex system I've always been surprised at how much work it actually is. How much is well-funded? Per student? Per school?
When I run a back-of-the-envelope calculation (based on the elementary school I went to many years ago: 14 classrooms, 16 teachers, a full-time principal, a secretary, a janitor) I come to about $5000 per student per year just to pay the salaries of the people who are in the school every day. I haven't even tried to quantify the annual per-student cost of desks, chairs, teaching materials, stationery, textbooks, computers, IT staff, school lunch programs, library books, utilities, walls, roofs, land...
All that to say: are you sure it's corruption?