Okay, let’s look at it this way. This guy owes you a bunch of money. He has owed it to you for a long time. For a while, he had been making steady payments, but then he claimed to have hit a rough patch. He came, hat in hand, to ask if he could skip a year’s worth of payments to regain his financial footing. You figured, “Hey, we’re all in this together, so I’ll cut him some slack.”

But, as Isaac Hayes said on the “Hot Buttered Soul” album, “Sometimes, people mistake kindness for weakness and they trip out on it.” When it came time for your debtor to resume payments, he did like John Belushi when he got cornered by Carrie Fisher in “The Blues Brothers.”

It’s not my fault! I ran out of gas! Aliens stole my money! Has a year passed already? I forgot my wallet! Are you sure I didn’t pay you? I had a flat tire!

You tried to be patient. There’s no way this guy is going to stiff you, right, considering that he knows that the money is going to help kids? But stiff you, he does, time after time, growing bolder and more vitriolic with each passing year. Finally, he gets to the point where he just tells you that he’s not going to pay what he owes and what are you going to do about it?

You finally take him to court and it takes the judge about 20 minutes to find in your favor. In fact, she stops just short of backhanding the deadbeat upside his fat head. So what does this deadbeat do? He goes to another court in an effort to stall the first court from enforcing its decision. This drags on for years while the children suffer and the deadbeat’s wallet keeps getting fatter.

Then, a funny thing happened. Public opinion began to turn against the deadbeat to the point where he saw his cushy gig threatened. He got together with his new powerful friend, Il Duce (pronounced Douche-y) and they hatched a plot. They would pay you some of the money that was owed and they would do so by taking money out of your own bank account. They knew that your kids were hurting for money, so they can get away with partially stiffing you on a permanent basis. And then they’ll try to take credit for their fake-ass heroism.

Is anybody really buying this nonsense? The Legislature has been shirking its constitutional responsibility for nearly a decade and was facing an angry court that had finally become impatient. El Douche-y had his moistened finger to the wind and realized that his (ugh!) national aspirations were about to devolve into a one-term governorship.

It’s a crappy C.Y.A. deal that takes money from the schools, long-term, and gives it to the schools, short-term. It allows the Legislature to short-change the schools yet again and it’s done not for the right reasons, but simply for political expediency. And we’re supposed to applaud Douche-y for his “leadership?” Um, no.

There’s this old joke about a guy who approaches a woman at a party and asks her if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. She thinks about it for a second and then says that she would. He then asks if she would sleep with him for $50.

Offended, she exclaims, “No! What do you think I am?”

He says, “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

I think about that story every time I read a quote from Daniel Scarpinato, the paid mouthpiece for Gov. Doug Ducey. They say that everybody has a price, but I wonder how much I would have to be paid to lie for a living. Scarpinato has been at it for a while, working for several Republican campaigns, then for Republicans in the Arizona House and was national press secretary for the RNCC. (He’s like a hooker who gets passed around at a frat party, only with less integrity.)

Scarpinato’s take on the crappy deal is that it represents a “significant increase” in school spending. Wow. Even a kid in one of Arizona’s vastly underfunded schools would know that going from next-to-nothing to a-bit-more-than-next-to-nothing represents an increase. Adding “significant” to it is like adding “viable” to “alternative.” It doesn’t change anything.

Since when are we supposed to get all gushy when somebody does the job he is (over)paid to do? That’s the adult equivalent of participation trophies for all the kids on the junior soccer team. So, the governor sees to it that the schools get a portion of the money that they’ve been owed for years? That’s not the governor doing his damn job. It’s the governor doing part of his damn job. You don’t get a pat on the back for that; you get a kick in the butt.

The schools are hurting so badly, they’re going to have to accept this crappy deal. So, IF the governor doesn’t back out and IF the teacher-haters in the Legislature don’t pack the deal with too many poison pills and IF the people pass the measure next May, our schools would go from dead last in funding in the United States all the way up to 48th.

That would be a significant increase.

This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2015.

14 replies on “Danehy”

  2. Grow up Mr Danehy. If only you cared about city and county tax revenues so much. Oh look they are controlled by Dems that can do no wrong. Partisan hacks have caused this. Stop being just another one of them.

  3. Grow up Mr Danehy. If only you cared about city and county tax revenues so much. Oh look they are controlled by Dems that can do no wrong. Partisan hacks have caused this. Stop being just another one of them.

  4. Would anyone besides me have the guts to point out that not only are school administrators vastly overpaid, but teachers are in fact well paid and the moaning and groaning that they are suffering is crocodile tears at best. Salary schedules should be based upon the average of the people – that is, taxpayers – who are paying the salaries. The lowest rungs should be 10 percent above that average and the highest rung should be 60 percent above that average. In both cases, compute all benefits to come up with the figures. Administrators should not exceed double the average. Period. Public schools have plenty of money, they are just spending it where it is not needed. That’s called waste.

  6. “Teacher haters in the Legislature” Sounds like those same nasty Republicans that want to poison the water and air and want Granny to live on Alpo. Only idiots like No Testicles Tommy would write something as moronic as that. And only his 3 L”s are dumb enough to believe it.

  7. Somehow being 50th of 50 states in school per capita spending doesn’t bode well that “Public schools have plenty of money….” True someone has to be last in any race, but that doesn’t translate into everything fine. Is this a race we want to be dead last in? And proud of?

  8. This deal adds $300 per pupil, when AZ spends $3000 less per pupil than the national AVERAGE. Additionally AZ teacher salaries are the lowest in the nation. Teachers are fleeing the state. Most school districts have several open teaching positions form which they can’t find full-time qualified teachers. This article is an accurate summation of the Ducey plan.

  9. What about the money received from sale and leases of closed schools? wasn’t that supposed to be used for budget expenses? We still do not know the REAL number of how much is spent per student because we have never seen tracking of all the other sources of funding.

    But you never seem to address this as stated last week by Jonathan Paton in the Maria Herreras article Zona Politics:

    (Paton) And if you put in 49th in education in a Google search, you’ll come up with more than one state. You come up with multiple states. It’s sort of the same thing every year. The difference in Arizona funding is that we have the School Facilities Board that pays for school construction. Most other states that’s done with property taxes. In Arizona it’s done at the state level. It completely skews ….

    So are we comparing apples to oranges? Our level of funding does not include school construction costs?

    It would only stand to reason that we should not be spending at the same level as any other state.

  10. My guess is that our governor and legislature will take one look at the state’s general fund surplus in January and decide to lower taxes yet again. I suspect the bill has already been drafted. And since all this will take place long before May 17’s special election, maybe folks will wake up sufficiently to vote against the raid on the State Lands Trust and we’ll be back to square one re school funding. And that will mean more stalling by the majority, hopefully leading to some contempt of court citations against leaders of House and Senate, maybe even the governor. You read it here first.

  11. Rat T has a point here. “What about the money received from sale and leases of closed schools? wasn’t that supposed to be used for budget expenses? We still do not know the REAL number of how much is spent per student because we have never seen tracking of all the other sources of funding.”

    I am getting pretty tired of people calculating how “low” are teachers are paid while excluding cost of living here in Tucson too.

    I agree that many of the front-line teachers could do with a higher salary than what they have now. Where we differ, is how we make this happen. I would prefer that an administrator or two disappear and their salaries be dispersed among the real teachers.

    The cost per pupil will also be reduced when we start deporting illegal aliens as well. Less ESL teachers will be needed. That is an undeniable fact.

  13. Once again, Tom nails it. And once again, those who refuse to look at the issues honestly and factually spew the typical blinders on nonsense: school teachers aND administrators in Arizona just make too much.

    Looks like our state shortage of Math teachers had been longer lived than I thought.

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