Tax Returns: Bama pays the military, Biden still a cheap fuck

Beyond Saving
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Tax Returns: Bama pays the military, Biden still a cheap fuck

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324240804578418842282798284.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird

I always find it interesting to take a gander at the tax returns of the President and Vice President. This year, Bama payed an effective rate of 18.4% on an income of $608,611 which is a lower than average for someone with his income, but that is mostly due to an impressive $150k donated to charity. The Obama's donated to a wide range of charities from medical research to educational to homeless shelters. It seems like their standard donation is $1,000 with a few charities getting a bit more. The big standout is just under $104k to The Fisher House Foundation which provides lodging and rehabilitation services for wounded veterans and their families; a pretty logical choice for a President during wartime, but politics aside I think it should be noticed. The Obama's pocket only about 52% of their income, the rest goes to taxes and charity. 

What always cracks me up is Joe Biden. That man has to be the cheapest fuck around, donating a mere $7,190 of his $386k to charity almost a third of which was in clothing, furniture and other goods donated to Goodwill. The charities he actually gave money to included $3,400 to churches and $1,200 to Northern Virginia Community College. It amazes me that someone who knows their tax return is going to be public is so stingy, especially when they go out there and bitch about the top 1% not doing enough to help the poor. Guess what Mr. Biden, you ARE the top 1% dipshit.    

 

If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X


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Vastet wrote:Beyond Saving

Vastet wrote:
Beyond Saving wrote:

Vastet wrote:
No private school is a success. Its very existence wears on the public system and helps create the very economic disparity and intellectual bankruptcy rampant in your country. Only an idiot would support private schools.

So private schools are bad because they are so much better than public? lol. 

Not because they are better, but because they are elitist and exclusionary. Because they drain resources from the systems available to everyone in order to give resources to systems that are specifically designed for a vast minority. It dumbs down the general population. Why would anyone want to be surrounded by idiots just so a few people get the opportunity and education to be successful? Yes a poorly funded school is capable of delivering a good education, but when the best teachers are lured to rich private schools by bigger paycheques the result is dumber teachers on average in the public system.

Nice theory except in the US private school teachers make far less than their public counterparts, especially when you factor in the government benefits. A few high end private schools might offer better pay, but they are the exception. Most private schools also charge far less per student than government schools get. Funding wise, government schools in the US get far more than all but the most exclusive private schools and way more than any schools in other countries. To say that our schools are failing because they are underfunded is ludicrous. There are some schools in poor areas that have legitimate funding problems, but those are a small portion of our schools and our problems are clearly much larger than just those schools. Kids in really rich areas that go to schools overflowing with money are getting sub par educations. 

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_075.asp

Couldn't find any info on private school teacher salaries in Canada but I suspect they are also much lower than their public counterparts.

 

If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X


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Vastet wrote:Incidentally, I

Vastet wrote:
Incidentally, I apologise for the idiot remark. I was on EXC bashing mode when you stepped in and I haven't had the mental flexibility recently to switch gears on the fly. I prefer to reserve my insults for counter attacks, not provocations, and you didn't say anything to warrant that response.

No offense was taken. I assumed you were just blowing off steam from the douche attack on your blog. 

If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X


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That's very interesting. I

That's very interesting. I know from speaking to teachers that private schools tend to offer better wages than public schools in Canada, and I assumed the same was true in the US. It also made logical sense that in order to have an education worth paying for that you'd want the best, which would cost more. I wonder why private schools can be at all successful in the US if their strategy doesn't include higher wages and stricter requirements for their teachers. I'd have thought home schooling would be the preferable choice in that scenario.

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 I think teaching is one of

 I think teaching is one of those fields that tend to attract people for non-monetary reasons and a good teacher is one who is passionate about what they do to the point where they would do it as volunteer work if they didn't have the pesky necessity of paying bills. Probably one of the most frequent complaints I have heard from public school teachers is the amount of bureaucracy they have to deal with and the amount of meddling the administration staff and/or school board does with lesson plans and such. A private school is much more likely to give teachers the freedom to do what they want. If they want a specific book, they can simply get it without having to petition the school board and wait for it to get approved. It varies by school district and state, but in some areas the entire lesson plan is mapped out by people who will never set foot inside the classroom. For someone who is lazy and doesn't really want to teach, that is attractive. For someone with a passion about teaching and has ideas on how to do it better, such oversight is very difficult to work with and it might be worth a lower salary just to not deal with it.

Although, I think there is a strong argument that the reason private schools often outperform public schools has little to do with the relative quality of the teachers. Simply by virtue of being a private school demonstrates that the parents are more involved with their children's education than average. Even if they are not paying for it directly, they went through a certain amount of effort to get their child into the school. Such parents are more likely to make sure the kids study, have higher expectations and deal with any discipline problems quickly. They are more likely to communicate with the teacher and have an idea of what goes on than many parents who use public schools as day care and don't pay attention or care about their child's performance.

I think in many ways the environment fostered by private schools is more influential than the teachers. A student who is surrounded by other students who care about their grades and are actively pursuing academic success are more likely to do those things themselves. People tend to adopt the habits, passions and ambitions of their peers for better or worse. 

The best teacher in the world can't force an unwilling student to learn and a bright student willing to push themselves can learn a lot even if their teacher is mediocre. Which is also probably why homeschool students also tend to outperform public school students, because I doubt that all those parents just happen to be great teachers too. 

 

If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X


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This discussion is making me

This discussion is making me appreciate my childhood more. From grade 4 to grade 8 or so I was in a private school. I'll admit freely that the best math teacher I've ever known was there and the craziest teacher I've ever known was in a public school. But then the best English teacher I've had was public, and the most likely teacher to have been arrested was private.
The reason I appreciated that school as much as I did had nothing to do with the teachers or administration (many of whom probably should have been locked up, and hopefully have been by now), it was the class sizes that made all the difference in the world. The biggest classroom had maybe 15 students at most. Most were 10 or less.
That made a huge impact on every student.
And that, I think, is where the public systems' greatest flaw lies. Public schools have 25-50+ students per class. A significant percentage of those students will never get where they might have because no teacher has the time to give all their students the attention they need.

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Vastet wrote:This discussion

Vastet wrote:
This discussion is making me appreciate my childhood more. From grade 4 to grade 8 or so I was in a private school. I'll admit freely that the best math teacher I've ever known was there and the craziest teacher I've ever known was in a public school. But then the best English teacher I've had was public, and the most likely teacher to have been arrested was private...

Mr. Bonner-Morgan my English teacher had a deep voice, throaty laugh and smelled of smoke, he wore the same clothes every week, black pants and polo neck backdrop to a brown suede jacket which had leather patches at the elbows to make it invincible. His jacket had many pockets and his backy tin would rattle when he’d demonstrate to us from a squatting position his version of traditional ‘cossack’ dancing as he kicked out each leg alternately to the front, slowly at first then increasing to a fast tempo - the whole nine yards. He kept his hair trimmed using a number 1 or 2 and as we pawed over the Sunday supplement on Monday morning in a double lesson he’d often absent-mindedly stroke his spiky head as he selected our comprehension exercise for the coming week, while explaining the advantages gained for the people after the October Uprising.

After I left college my sister took her place in the class, not being right-brain dominant she preferred physics and chess and found Bonner-Morgan strange. I questioned her about this but whether it was the uniform, long coat or extravagant cough she couldn’t say. I later learnt she’d been right all along. He’d stolen two axes, one from a fire station and the other from a butcher shop and calmly walked into the main shopping precinct swinging first one axe and then the other into his skull while passers-by looked on.

Let that be a lesson to all you commie bastards out there!


 

 

Oh, but Peggotty, you haven't given Mr. Barkis his proper answer, you know.
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