Here come more cuts

      California fell almost $2 billion below estimates in personal income taxes paid in April.  The Legislative Analyst Office says that the state is some $3.5 billion behind the state forecasts for this year which are the basis for the current budget.    Thus, the legislature will again face cuts.  More cuts to schools, more cuts to social services, health care,  child support, police and fire protection.

            This approach to economics is called austerity.  It doesn’t work.  Austerity is being tried in Greece, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and Ireland, among others.  It does not work.  Austerity makes the economy worse – and thus further reductions of tax receipts and further cuts.

The economic crisis of 2007 to the present made matters worse.  The state took in some $30 billion less in taxes and thus had less to send to the schools.  School budgets have been cut by some $10 billion.  K-12 education receives about 40% of the California budget.  Thus any decline in the state budget leads directly to cuts in school services.

            The question for the corporate agenda, promoted by  the Chamber of Commerce among others  is can the economy prosper with a poorly educated work force.  California grew and prospered from 1970- 1994 based upon a well educated work force.  Then, in the 1994-2008 period over $10 billion of tax cuts were passed – making the current crisis much worse. This week we learned that Apple, and other corporations, are avoiding over $10 billion in taxes by moving one small office to Nevada.   California suffers from a decade of  corporate tax cuts and public disinvestment.  Today,  instead of following the education  approach,  conservative anti tax forces have imposed an Mississippi approach on California.

California public schools are in crisis- and they are getting worse. This is a direct result of massive budget cuts imposed by the legislature and the governor in the last four years.  Total per pupil expenditure is down by over $1,000 per student. The result- massive class size increases.  Students are in often classes too large for learning.  Supplementary services such as tutoring and art classes have been eliminated.  Over 14,000 teachers have been dismissed, and thousands more face lay offs this fall. This is not the fault of teachers. 

How Apple avoids California taxes and bankrupts California schools

How Apple sidesteps Billions in Taxes

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI. NYTimes.

RENO, Nev. — Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy. Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft derive not from physical goods but from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software that makes devices work. Other times, the products themselves are digital, like downloaded songs. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers. A downloaded application, unlike a car, can be sold from anywhere.

Read the entire article. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=all

Apple's Steve Jobs: anti union

Don’t Confuse Me With Any Facts
Filed under: General — Leo Casey @ 1:27 pm
Apple Computers CEO Steve Jobs and Dell Computers CEO Michael Dell had a recent joint appearance in Austin, Texas.
Jobs, sitting atop a non-union corporation, seized the occasion to attack teacher unions; Dell offered a different point of view. “I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.” Dell, who sat on his hands during Jobs’ anti-union comments, responded that unions were developed because “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”
In a reaction that would have made Pavlov proud, the anti-teacher union blogosphere has been disseminating Jobs’ — but not Dell’s — comments. If you have a lot of free time on your hands, check out the pro-corporate, anti-union Amen chorus here, here, and here.
There is a not so little fly in the ointment here. Jobs made his comments in the capitol of Texas, a “right to work” state where collective bargaining for public school educators is prohibited by law. If there is anything like the unthinking shibboleth of “life time employment of K-12 teachers” in Texas, Jobs is going to have to find a villain for his tale other than teacher unions. In fact, Edwize readers may remember the story we covered here last year of a Texas teacher of art who was fired for taking her students on a school approved trip to a museum of art, after a parental complaint of a naked statue — some life time employment. The tenor of Jobs’ comments about losing business in Texas suggests that he is quite oblivious to the status of collective bargaining in the Lone Star State, much less the ease with which Texas educators are fired for simply doing their jobs.
For that matter, there is a not insubstantial list of “right to work” states that prohibit collective bargaining for public school educators, mostly from the South and the former Confederacy: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Note that anti-teacher union corporate partisans like Jobs never compare the educational performance of these “right to work states” to the educational performance of states with high levels of teacher unionization, despite the rather obvious counterfactual and terms of comparison.
Don’t confuse the anti-union crowd with any facts.

Leo Casey. U.F.T.

Forcing a Risky Business Model on Us
By Robert Brower
By applying an untested business model to educational reform, political and business leaders are openly promulgating forced competition among schools. They are demanding change for change’s sake, coveting any new idea that comes along to demonstrate anecdotal improvement and using flawed statistics to foist unproven changes on our schools. This strong push is more about political dogma than about raising the performance of public school students.
As educational leaders, we must make our collective voice heard loudly and clearly before it is too late. We are being driven down a tangential road by those with influence in high places who lack even basic expertise in educational research and whose desire for good political sound bites is more important than the future of our children.
Not only is the business model of reform misguided, there is not a shred of statistically significant research that supports the notion that competition will solve whatever ails K-12 education. If we succumb to this experiment of political thought, the consequences may be devastating to our economic and social future…
Unfortunately, many educators do not recognize the hidden agenda — the dismantling of public education. During recent national elections it was common to hear politicians calling for schools to be operated more like retail franchises, competing for customers in a crowded marketplace. “Why,” these proponents ask, “should public schools be protected from competition?” But I ask, "Where is the research that supports such experimentation?"
Speculative Politics
As a public school educator for the last 33 years, I believe forcing business-like competition onto schools would lead –AND HAS ALREADY LED- to many undesired outcomes, while paying little attention to cooperative endeavors that could benefit students and school programs. For instance, the competitive business world does not encourage the sharing of successful strategies, but in education cooperation is a necessity.
Rather than shaming schools into improving, we should be supporting low-achieving schools partnering with successful schools. The “produce or die” operating model of the corporate arena and academia may work with manufacturing cogs and college professors, but this business approach to education has no proven track record of success for students and schools…
Continuing to advocate a politically motivated, market-driven system of education will only delay the real work that needs to be done to help our public schools grow. We should not be at odds with one another but rather respectful of our separate areas of expertise.
Robert Brower is superintendent of the North Montgomery Community School Corporation, 480 W. 580 North, Crawfordsville, IN 47933. E-mail: rbrower@nm.k12.in.us. Jan. 2007.

And, here I am a Mac user. :-(