Dimitri > wrote:

> Sure here's their budget.

> http://notebook.lausd.net/portal/pag..._schema=PTL_EP

> 7.9 BILLION DOLLARS. 31.9% benefit load.

When I go to that link, the document "Adopted 2007-08 Final
Budget" says on page 12 the adopted LAUSD final budget is
19.5 billion. Where do you get 7.9 billion?

In any case, the 19.5 billion comes to $24,000 per student
in LAUSD which sounds comparable to Berkeley Unified School District.
7.9 billion would be way low. Perhaps that's only the
so-called "general fund"?

For Berkeley, the number I get is that the city and school
district combined spend $560 million per year, which distributed
over 39,000 households which have an average income of $77,000
comes to 19% of household gross income spent on city
government/schools. Of course a number in the same range, or larger,
is spent on county, state and federal governments.

I'm happy with total government being maybe 1/3 of people's
income, but not 40% or 50%.

Further the current budgets are artificially low, due
to vast underfunding of benefit plans. At some point down the
road, accumulated pension and health benefit obligations
will start to approach or exceed the size of the total economy. In
any case they will rise way, way beyond the amount that can
be raised by taxation, even if it's socially acceptable to
divide society into an entitled class of former/current public
servants on the one hand, and a peon class for everyone else.

Quite obviously without painful reforms the US is headed to
fiscal collapse, and it will in all likelyhood happen first
in California. Possible future scenes are like those in Argentina
(where the government last year seized all public/private pension
money), or Ireland (where in the past week they laid a punitive
assessment on all retirement plans, leading to half a million
people protesting in the streets).

Let's see which California politicians actually want to
address these issues.

Steve