“Save the planet? We can’t even save ourselves. The earth has been around four-and-a-half billion years. The earth isn’t going anywhere. We are!”
Wise man George Carlin theorized that perhaps God forgot to create plastic and put us here to correct the oversight. Having served our purpose, we can just fade away.
The way petroleum-based predations have proliferated, polluted and perverted, perhaps God perfectly planned our end times and we’re too dumb to know better.
WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION? Did America become an empire just because of fortunate geography and geology? Not necessarily.
We also invested in that endangered species called public education.
How many times have you heard moonhowlers whine that throwing more money at education does not work. Surprise, surprise, benighted knowledge-phobes: It works.
In 1992, the Reno Gazette-Journal published a magnum opus, about 20 full pages over more than a week proving separate but unequal education in Washoe County.
Donations of outside money to schools in wealthy neighborhoods made a huge difference in outcomes. I personally handed copies to former superintendents Morrison and Martinez when they arrived for their brief career hops thru these parts.
Fast forward to the Dec. 13 New York Times which reported on a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It compared 26 states which devoted additional money to poor districts vs. those that did not. The extra funding produced double the achievement gains of class-size reduction. The effects lasted well into adulthood in the form of “wages that were nearly ten percent higher (and) a drop in the instance of adult poverty.”
The story will be linked to the Barbwire expanded web edition at NevadaLabor.com/
LABOR PAIN. Czar Donaldovitch has nominated restaurant chain gang boss Donald Puzder as secretary of labor. The putz has denounced the Labor Department’s overtime rule and told the Wall Street Journal that what workers “lose in overtime pay they gain in stature and sense of accomplishment.”
Try depositing stature at the bank.
Puzder also detests the minimum hourly wage, wanting to keep it at $7.25 where it cratered in 2009. Lots of coercive conservatives want it eliminated altogether to let the market decide. That market is somewhere in Bangladesh or Vietnam.
Millions of U.S. farm laborers, especially those outside California, still perform back-breaking work for sub-minimum pay. Some Nevada employees get less than $7.25 with tips adjusted against it. Do workers get an independent accounting of the tip pool? Don’t dare ask.
America peaked in 1968. The buying power of the dollar has only gone downhill since. Adjusted for inflation, the 1968 minimum wage of $1.60 would stand at $11.10 per hour today, which means workers now laboring at $7.25 are paid 35 percent less than half a century ago.
UNDECIMA. On Dec. 27, 2005, Betty Joyce Luffman Donlevy Barbano passed away in Reno.
YEAR-END OR END TIMES? Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential at BallotBoxing.US for the 2016 End of Times Report. Cheap and good for laughs? Jawohl.
Frohe Weihnachten und beste Wuensche fuer 2017.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Barbano is a 48-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988.
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