Wrong prescription, wrong vision too!

How fortunate that the teachers’ union aren’t doctors dealing with a hemorrhagic patient in the emergency room. They would have grandly rendered the wrong diagnosis and medical decision to resuscitate a dying patient. They know the patient would bleed to death, but they’ve recommended that he goes under the knife.

Such is the view of the teacher’s union when it recommended the consideration of the regressive sales tax in the middle of deepening economic crisis. You know the patient is hemorrhagic and yet you have the nerves to blindly recommend surgery because you’ve failed to take his condition to a third level of medical review to find out how to save him?

I’ve always had the greatest respect for teachers especially those without degrees–when most of us went to grammar and high school in the sixties–but whose products are in key positions today in both the private and public sectors. There’s something mythical about this group of ultra-dedicated teachers who cared about the future well-being of each of their pupils.

Theirs was the ultra-commitment to guide us forward in learning traditional English and Math–although my English and Math have often failed me–and kept a good handle of our errant ways by discussing them with our parents after school and at PTA meetings. They know the value of hardworking parents and the need to constantly revive that great sense of community here. And they were successful at it in every sense of the word.

Now, when degreed non-experts begin recommending half-cocked ideas in the middle of a worsening economic crisis, it goes to reflect their apparent shallowness and obvious failure to do their homework. Had they done their homework, they would have found out that at least 13 percent of the current gross tax is in fact sales tax.
Do you wish to increase this so to force the usual domino effect of additional cost being passed conveniently to consumers, including teachers?

The teachers’ union needs to be cautious with its warped agenda. The sales tax you’ve recommended was first introduced in 1979. Since then, it has been debated and regurgitated with incoherence. I’m not sure that your organization wants to perpetuate a discussion of an issue that is basically regressive and would land nowhere else except to promote more incoherent discussion.

Finally, the notion of organizing a teachers’ union is great except that you would have given greater emphasis to teacher welfare rather than student welfare or the dire need to upgrade quality of instructions in the Public School System. This holiday season, I will open my packages from all over, including education so that I share them with you over the next year. It should prove an interesting debate far beyond your wildest imaginings about an irrelevant and regressive sales tax and other surprises.

The Bill of No Rights

We’ve been taught our Bill of Rights since high school. The learning process goes on beyond school campuses into the national march for racial justice. But like the proverbial quarter, there’s also The Bill of No Rights. Here are some which you might wish to ponder:

• If you’re inherently lazy and jobless, please don’t even fantasize going to the Food Stamps Office because it isn’t society’s obligation to reward non-productive people.

• If you’re a policymaker who treats the serious financial straits of the NMI with insensitivity and inconsequence, you have no right airing your juvenile views. In fact, not only do you need a Wake Up Call, but a Shut Up Call too!

• If you believe that the single magical cure to our inadequacies is a federal takeover, you have no right to impose your errant views with grand incoherence, publicly. Stick it in your ears!

• If you’re a believer that more taxes are needed in the middle of the current crisis, you have no right to tread planet NMI. I strongly recommend that you hurl your warped ideas either at Suicide or Banzai Cliff.

• If you’re a legislator who believes in imposing more strangling statutory mandates against the private sector, you have no right to sit in either chamber of the legislature. In fact, take your blind ambitions and hide it in your back pockets.

• Finally, there are only two rules in this non-rights. Rule 1). JR is always right! Rule 2.) If you disagree, please return to Rule 1! Have a nice day!