40,000 Illinois State Workers To Get 14% Payraises

Springfield, Ill. - More than 40,000 unionized state workers got a pay raise last Thursday, bringing to 7 percent the amount they're gotten since last year. These same state employees are in line for another 7 percent by next July 1, all at a cost of a half-billion tax dollars a year.

It's more than the virtually bankrupt state can afford, and some Republican lawmakers say the raises need to be rolled back.

http://www.slate.com/id/2257453

Click on the link for more - a great read...

But suppose integration doesn’t change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck’s Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White, Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.

Buck draws on empirical studies that suggest a correlation between integrated schools and social disapproval of academic success among black students. He also cites the history of desegregation’s effect on black communities and interviews with black students to back up a largely compelling—and thoroughly disturbing—story. Desegregation introduced integrated schools where most of the teachers and administrators were white and where, because of generations of educational inequality, most of the best students were white. Black students bused into predominantly white schools faced hostility and contempt from white students. They encountered the soft prejudice of low expectations from racist teachers who assumed blacks weren’t capable and from liberals who coddled them. Academic tracking shunted black students into dead-end remedial education. The effect was predictably, and deeply, insidious. The alienation typical of many young people of all races acquired a racial dimension for black students: Many in such schools began to associate education with unsympathetic whites, to reject their studies, and to ostracize academically successful black students for “acting white.”

In Boston, integration, the pet pseudo scientific fly bottle of wealthy,suburban liberals effected mostly poor black and poor white communities. For decades.

All over the world, poor peoples first taste of their capitalism, is owning a bit of land and a house. This is what they borrow against, what gives them social and political ties. This is what Public Housing is meant to prevent.( Hernando DeSoto, The Other Path )

Much if not most of government services not only is no help, it is harmful.

Also, wiki a little on James M. Buchanan and Public Choice Theory. He got a Nobel for it. In a nutshell, bureaucracies are rewarded for making problems worse. It is not in the interest in those that have invested their lives, and are depended upon the pay, to solve the problem.

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