No, it’s just another of her rantings that she actually doesn’t know anything about, at all.
So then, you don’t have any experience with the frustration of high taxes going to crap schools?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Your weird rhetorical questions aside, what does this have to do with the issue of a school putting up a fence keeping out dog walkers and children playing? Would you be less upset if the school district in question was a really first-rate school? Would you be less upset if the tax rate were low? I think you would be outraged and ranty about it no matter what your taxes or the quality of your school district was. You also sound to me like the type of person who is outraged to have to pay taxes to support public schools in any way, for any reason, and you come up with poor justifications for that unjustifiable view. (I.e., “the schools suck,” “we are educating Mexicans who aren’t even here legally,” “they won’t let me walk my dog on the grounds,” etc.)
I don’t know; based on your posts in this thread and the one in GD, I feel sorry for you, because it seems like something pretty shitty must have happened at some point in your life. Actually, I think even sven said it better:
I do, and it’s annoying as hell. Kind of irrelevant to you, since you have no kids in the schools, but I’ll grant you that it is annoying. However, I fail to get your point regarding schools that you pay for, but have no access to. I’m gathering that the school district has been having trouble with vandalism & such happening on school property, so it makes sense to limit access when school isn’t in session. I doubt it’s some kind of conspiracy against childless people.
ETA: If you have a chance to respond to my post #202 in the GD thread about kids & pets, I’d appreciate it!
Around here we have low taxes going to both good and bad schools.
The whiners still whine, no matter how low the taxes are. They whine if they have kids in school. They whine if they don’t. Taxes have two purposes, to raise money and to cause whiners to whine.
I’m childfree, by the way, and kids are okay. If one were dropped on my doorstep, I’d raise it and probably do a mediocre job at it. I think I’m probably pretty average amongst the childfree in my attitude toward children.
Yeah, I know - having someone out there who has seriously different viewpoints than you do can be really unsettling. :rolleyes:
Your ability to make wild negative jumps of non-logic are simply amazing. No where did I say I hate blacks or Mexicans, and I doubt I even said I hate children. Simply noticing trends in a sub group is not hate, simply believing that children should know English before they attend public school in the US in not hate. Hell, people who love children think that one! Are you even aware of how much it holds all of the children back when there are non-English speakers in the class? Or are you so blinded by the desire to beat up on the crazy childfree woman that your brain is on hold?
Snip the next bunch of junk because it is nothing but the ranting of an immature person that is threatened by the idea of different opinions. As well an unreal talent for reading incomprehension. Some of the things you say are so far out in left field that I wonder just exactly what you have been reading (or drinking or snorting). The conspiracy of doctors??? I love how you can internet psychoanalyze tho - haven’t seen that on a supposedly adult forum in quite a while.
Snort. At least I’m not spending a bunch of time trying to project what appear to be your problems on to other people. You are bitching because I try to make my posts clear enough for you to understand by breaking up the response? Sad. I’m thinking it might be time for you to step away from the computer and have a look at the world around you. Well, maybe not your world, since somehow you ended up with the idea that whatever you think is normal is the One Right Way.
If you had been paying attention at all you would know the answers to those questions. Yes, I would be less upset (probably not at all) if the taxes were actually providing a decent education. Yes, I’d be less upset if the tax rate was lower, since at least then they wouldn’t be wasting so much money on what has more or less become a babysitting system.
So, as to the question you ignored due to your lack of ability to understand the situation out here is not rhetorical. If you were paying high property taxes to fund fourth rate schools, it is quite possible you would have a completely different view of this. As I said several posts up, it is certainly not just the childfree who have a big problem with as parents (the ones who can afford it) would like to quit paying high property taxes and private school tuition just to make sure their kids get a decent education. But of course, it’s much easier to just jump on the childfree person rather than realize that hey! things might be different out here than they are in Ohio.
Almost everyone had some shitty thing happen to them at some point in their lives. Some of us learn from those things, others try to pretent they never happened or go to the other extreme and let it rule their lives and color their opinions of those who are different. I am the first one - so far you appear to be the last.
So, you don’t think your experiences have colored your opinion of those who are different?
Again, I’m failing to get your point, or understand what you are complaining about here. Is your problem with educating children? Is it with the cost of educating children? Is it that you think that the goverment spending on children is wasteful and ineffficient? Is it that you don’t have children, so you resent tax dollars being spent on them? Is it that you think that government facilities should be available to the general public for use, regardless of what their actual purpose is? Your points go all over the place, and don’t seem to have a thesis to support.
What have you tried to learn from your shitty experiences? From what I can tell, all you’ve learned is how to be angry.
Well, I gave a dissenting view, as a parent who educates her children privately, has no desire to see voucher systems implemented, and has no problem with her 4000+ in annual property taxes going towards public schools (at least some of it). I am in SoCal, and while I certainly wouldn't rate our public education system among the best in the nation, mileage varies from district to district. This is due to a few districts with good lobbyists having themselves declared Basic Aid districts- also known as the "nifty fifty"- they receive MORE per child than the other districts in CA, because they bullied the state into it during the Prop 13 debacle (in CA, local taxes do not fund local schools- all the $ goes up to Sacramento, where lots of folks get to run their fingers over it, and then some of it is funneled back down to the school districts- not evenly as mentioned earlier).
I would be interested in your research pool, except that I know you don’t have one.
I never said it was a conspiracy, it’s just that the only thing I was getting out of the schools - being able to train on the grounds - is now gone. If it was due to vandalism, it must have been occurring in some other part of the city since there wasn’t any to be seen at the two schools I went to. So, now I get to pay tons of money to a school system that not only isn’t doing much towards educating anyone, I can’t even walk on the grounds over the summer.
I’ll go over there now. I don’t get many notices that there have been responses to threads I’ve subscribed to, I suppose because of that “you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again”. Anyway, I tend to miss things!
“Tons of money?” How much would that be? My property taxes are about 3% of my income, and my tax rate is 1.1% of the home’s appraised value. That is certainly not outrageous.
Indeed.
The only colors on my opinions are those differences that affect my life in a negative way. Such as spending more and more tax money to teach children of illegals (who don’t pay taxes) to speak English, which has made the whole public educational system here go in the crapper. Such as having to deal over and over with idiotic entitlement attitudes at work. (Since I no longer work, this one will fade.) Such as having to run out in the driveway at o’dark thirty am to shut off the car alarm on the truck because someone thought it was a great idea to crank up their stereo to the point it heavily vibrated the truck. From over a 100 feet away, with our two story house in between as well as seven feet tall of stone fence. Not to mention what it does to our windows. Such as my family and a goodly number of rank strangers thinking there is something warped about me because I didn’t pop out a kid or three. With repetition over the decades, yeah those things start to color my opinions of those specific different people.
How this applies to opinions on the internet, I don’t know. People get nuts because my conclusions from my experiences don’t match theirs, or because I don’t automatically love their kid more than I love my cat. What does it matter? They act like I’m queen of the universe or something, as if my opinions will become law tomorrow so by God they had better squish them right now! I haven’t seen this sort of thing since the old Usenet days.
So the answer is yes: your experiences have colored your opinions of those who are different.
Can I get a cite for a post where someone has suggested that you should love their child more than you should love your cat? I have certainly seen people say that they love their own children more than their own pets. I have seen people say that a pet owner’s love for their pet is not comparable to a parent’s love for their child. I have not seen anyone suggest that you should love their child more than you love your cat, however, so maybe you could give me a pointer to where that has occurred.
Kids who do not speak English are not put in classes with non-English speakers. They are put in ESL classes until they can pass a proficiency test. A simple Google search turned up this program that exemplifies what I mean. Thus, the non-English speaking kids are not “holding all the other children back.” They are separated until they can keep up. Of course, once they transition to mainstream classes, they are often not as proficient as their native speaking classmates, but your claim that they are in classes with native speakers when they cannot speak English is false IME.
Also, I find it ironic that in post #59 of this thread, you claim that your public school failed to adequately educate you because
But you resent having to pay to adequately fund the education of others.
I think you’re mistaking your own experiences for bullshit rightwing talking points.
No, it isn’t, but in fairness to curlcoat, tax rates vary wildly, and we don’t know what she pays where she lives. For instance, my rate is 8.65% of the assessed value of my house (and property values here are high). It can be frustrating when taxes go up, up, up, and the quality of education and other services is going down, down, down.
That being said…
With all due respect, you aren’t supposed to be personally getting something out of the schools. For that matter, neither am I, nor any other adult…the schools aren’t for us. If you have a beef with the quality of the schools, I’m with you there, but the purpose of the school isn’t to give you a place to walk your dogs.
Regarding what I said about vandalism…I’m guessing that there was some kind of problem on school property in your district, or I doubt the district would have spent money to put a fence up. Why don’t you contact the district and find out why the fence is up? Maybe there’s a good reason, and if you knew what it was, it wouldn’t aggravate you so much.
Not what my dictionary says. If you want to use words in ways not generally used by the rest of the English-speaking world, you might want to let us know ahead of time, or find better words.
You stated you hadn’t been to school in over 30 years and weren’t familiar with what they taught.
I suppose it will surprise you to know people have been making this same complaint for longer than you have been alive. Another of your complaints, “That music the kids are listening to isn’t music at all,” is the same; old farts said that about the music you listened to when youwere a kid. These compalints have always existed. Old people whine about kids. It’s the natural order of things.
You’ve slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, have you? You get a lot of use out of nuclear missile silos?
Of course we should be concerned about where the money is spent. If the money spent on schools is poorly spent - which may or may not be true in your area, I don’t know - that’s a matter of great concern, and you’re quite right to complain. What you don’t have any right to bitch about is that you have to pay for schools despite not having kids of your own. You pay for schools not because you have kids but because we ALL pay for schools, and we ALL get a chance at a public education. One education for each potential future taxpayer. That’s the fairest system.
Generally, yes, they do.
If there is a salestax, they pay it. (There is no cash register in the country programmed to accept a keystroke indicating “illegal alien, suppress the tax.”)
If there is a property tax, they pay it. No tax district tells the appraisers to skip over any house owned by an illegal alien or any assessor to withhold the bills to such a house. (And no landloerd fails to include property taxes in the amount he or she charges for rent.)
If there is income tax, they might avoid it, but they will probably have to pay it. Housekeepers and gardeners who are being paid under the table might get away with no income tax (thanks to the largesse of those people weathy enough to actually have housekeepers and gardeners who are willing to cheat the government). However, the majority of illegal immigrants are working in factories or for construction companies or farms that are large enough to attract the attention of the IRS, (which will penalize them if they cannot produce withholding statements for their employees). So the majority of illegals are actually paying taxes deducted from their paychecks, using forged or stolen Social Securty numbers, but they are severely limited in their ability to file tax forms with the IRS, so they do not get back any of the refunds due to the sort of exemptions that legal folks get.