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A letter to my students

blogs.berkeley.edu

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Re: A letter to my students

#161

Post by [deleted] »

krschultz wrote: post #117
patio11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars) 1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B) 2008-2009: $144B ($145) 2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B) Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled. You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less. I feel the urge to get ou…

It has not more than doubled . Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them. Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664 $28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person. And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not every…

[deleted]

Re: A letter to my students

#162

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #161
krschultz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has not more than doubled . Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them. Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664 $28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person. And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not every…

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[deleted]

Re: A letter to my students

#163

Post by Locke1689 »

stevoski wrote: post #115
Locke1689 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I went ahead and did a calculation of my own: revenue by all taxes per capita in the state of California between 2005 and 1964. All following figures are from US census data: Total revenue from all taxes per capita 1964: $2182.85 (helpfully provided by the 1964 census). Total revenue from all taxes 2005: $146,692,000,000 Total resident population of California, 2005: 36,250,000 Total revenue from all taxes per cap…

I think you should be looking at revenue by taxes as a % of GDP, rather than in $ terms. Real GDP per person is much higher in CA today than in 1964. Did government spending increase relative to the size of the economy? Or decrease?

I think that's a good point. The increase should be compared to the increase in GDP, the increase in the workforce (women working) and a number of other variables. I'm swamped as it is, maybe you want to do those calculations? ;)

Re: A letter to my students

#164

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #161
krschultz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has not more than doubled . Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them. Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664 $28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person. And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not every…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: A letter to my students

#165

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #161
krschultz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has not more than doubled . Don't throw around numbers if you haven't actually looked at them. Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664 $28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person. And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not every…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: A letter to my students

#167

Post by [deleted] »

protomyth wrote: post #152
vital101 wrote: post #114

I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so.…

The raise in taxes might actually have the effect of decreasing the tax base by being the point at which people leave the state. Michigan has a lot of years with a strong Detroit. Now, they have to look at getting new industry and/or belt tightening. It looks like they went for the "in your face" version instead of reducing staff in the counties.

[deleted]

Re: A letter to my students

#168

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #13
pg wrote: post #4

There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower. Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflati…

Not an answer, but you should probably adjust by some sort of CA wage index rather than purely inflation, since a lot of things the government pays for have grown more expensive much faster than inflation (like salaries of sysadmins, and land). Looking at revenues as a percentage of state GDP would be one approximation (that would also bake in a correction for population growth). I do think it's likely they haven't d…

[deleted]

Re: A letter to my students

#169

Post by igravious »

mkr-hn wrote: post #120
igravious wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pity you had to use such crude language while making your point. I'd like to see these figures per state. And then I'd like to see the percentage of the budget over time that is allocated to locking up citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...

I think it's a safe bet that anyone who finds themselves this deep in a site like HN is either an adult, or a kid with parents who give him/her a lot of freedom.

sigh Totally unexpected down-modding :) At the time I left this remark the commenter had only like 3 or 4 points and I was afraid that his use of the word "fuck" was causing his pertinent info to get overlooked. So I was trying to steer people towards this salient info regarding incarceration rates. I am not in the slightest bit offended by the language :) I was afraid others might be and was trying to offset that behaviour and I get modded down to the flames of hell and those who reply to me get tons of karma.

For fuck's sake, where's the justice? Anyway, the dudes now got over 30 points so maybe my heroic effort did not go in vain. On-topic: unjustly locking up a whole swathe of your citizen's has got to be a drain on resources. Compare US incarceration rates to most Western European countries and think about the consequences for a while.

Re: A letter to my students

#170

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I wrote three comments and erased them all before posting. Let's try #4:

This thing bugs me in a greater sense than simply the issues or people involved, and here's why: you're paying this guy to petition his students to pay him more. Strip away all the (real) problems and politics and all of that, and you end up with some guy you write a check to who is doing his best to a) call you a slovenly idiot, b) get you to spend more on him and his projects, and c) use his position as educator to influence his students to advance his causes.

He may be exactly correct. I don't think he is, but whether he is correct or not doesn't matter. Even if he is 100% accurate in everything he says, it's a conflict of interest. We simply can't have people on the public dole who also are political activists -- even in their spare time. I wish there was some way around this quandary -- the military has higher standards but we still see them getting dragged into various political fights. We have scientists who are activists, teachers who are promoting dissent, and public sector unions who are playing politics with public funds.

Again, it's not that I disagree with their politics or efforts. It's that we cannot self-stimulate. The money that comes from taxpayers cannot be caught into a feedback loop to promote even more money coming from taxpayers. The people we entrust with various public functions cannot also be using the stature we give them to score political points.

The only exceptions to this are political appointees, whose sole purpose is to play politics and be party hacks. For the rest of them, I am concerned that this is a really bad thing that is only getting worse and worse over time. I really hope some of these professional organizations can come up with appropriate ethical standards. It's like I read the other day: it used to be that scientists told you what "is". Now they tell you what we need "to do". (It was accompanied by an interesting graph from Lexis-Nexis with the frequency of the words "science says we must" which is rising exponentially in popular media.)

Aside from the specific politics in this case, the trend here is not good at all.

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