News New Mexico: 10/07/16

The Sun-News is nothing more than a propaganda sheet. Virtually every headline on budgeting in the Sun-News is written to serve the political agenda of Democrat reporters and editors. Almost every story on budgeting contains words and phrases designed to shape the views of the reader rather than provide facts and inform.

Still, I need to look at the obituaries every day, so I log on to the Sun-News website to make sure I didn’t die. This morning I logged on and decided to surf the "news" stories.

Same old drivel.

There is a story in today’s paper with the headline “Students stage walk in to support public education.” If you glance at the headline the story seems harmless enough. But if you are even a wee bit informed, you quickly recognize that activist teachers are manipulating naïve children to support their Democratic Party political agendas. How wonderful it must be to get the local paper to write propaganda pieces to help your cause and call it "news."

The result data has been in on public education for decades. Public education is failing and failing in a big way. America has been throwing more and more money at education for three generations while simultaneously seeing poorer and poorer results.

Most school teachers, who are at the bottom of the resource consuming food chain in the public education monster, can tell you all about the deterioration of attitudes and behaviors of children who show up in their classrooms every year. Overcoming this situation is the most difficult aspect of their job. More money won’t fix this horrible problem. Teachers can also tell you they are shorted on resources with larger classroom sizes and onerous testing requirements. Administrators call for one size fits all curriculum that replaces teacher creativity. Mandates from above are a way of life for the once creative island know as the teaching profession.

The larger classroom sizes are real, though studies unequivocally show there is zero correlation between classroom size and academic achievement. Unfortunately what is NEVER part of any discussion regarding education in the Sun-News is the heavy hand of big government and of the teachers unions on the budget. Sadly, many school teachers who think political activism is the solution to problems simply call for more milking of the taxpayers. They never stop to think about how much money gets squandered before it ever makes it to the classroom budgets. Administrative jobs are thick at every public school as well as every administration central office. You want to be informed about budgeting in education? Spend a week observing bureaucrats killing time on the public school payrolls while wasting resources by the millions. Do so and you will never plead for more milking of the taxpayers again. Still this is exactly what the Sun-News article calls for without ever bothering to use a little logic and follow the money wasted by the public education monster.

And of course the propaganda in the Sun-News is predictable in that Governor Martinez (the Republican), is the simplistic whipping girl of yet another sloppy hit piece.

There is another hit piece in the Sun News today. It speaks of a budget repair sent to the Governor by the state legislature. It focuses on the efforts of the GOP to reinstate the death penalty in New Mexico for the most atrocious crimes. The article quickly glosses over the basic problem in New Mexico, which is that despite the fact that the oil and gas industry pays the bills in New Mexico, Democrats are constantly poisoning the business environment for oil and gas as well as all other businesses. Other businesses are capable of taking on more of the burden from oil and gas, but only if they are treated more fairly with an eye towards long term growth.

School teacher activists (Democrats) are the favorites of Sun-News reporters and editors so their partisan views are constantly trumpeted in the paper. In the real world of results, Democrats have two clear solutions right under their noses. Choice number one would be to call for the elimination of 20-25% of all administrative positions in the education bureaucracy so that those funds could be invested in more teachers and shrink classroom sizes. They could also stop biting the hand that feeds them and improve the business environment for the oil and gas industry and all others as is the case in every single state that borders New Mexico. Instead of helping with real solutions it is a sign of the times that journalists writing stories about budgets and their activist Democrat school teacher pals are so uninformed about the subject that they are reduced to blaming the only people who can actually provide real long range solutions.

No, I do not regret cancelling my subscription to the Las Cruces Sun-News decades ago. The only thing that has changed at the paper is the violation of basic common sense on budgets and finance is more blatant and ignorant than ever.