Durham Public Schools will be in the mega-red in the coming year, despite a just-passed sales tax increase earmarked for education. It never ends.
Yes, these are tough times, and tough times demand tough decisions and a little sacrifice. Thousands of employees in the private sector have had no raises in the past three years of the Obama Economy. But that’s a damn sight better than having no job at all. Public sector managers and employees don’t seem to understand what happens in the real world.
In the case of DPS, left-wing activists from the People’s Alliance, Durham’s version of a socialist party, are using the lack of raises to pull at our heart strings and prepare us for another property tax increase:
Advisory committee member Page McCullough, representing the People’s Alliance political action group, said she worries that folks are under the assumption that because of the sales tax referendum’s passage, there won’t be a need for layoffs.
“We’ve really got to figure out how to talk about the fact that people are upping their taxes, and we still might have layoffs,” she said. “It doesn’t add up to people – and these are people who read the paper everyday.”
The estimate discussed this week does not include raises for district employees, making it the fourth consecutive year that they’d go without paycheck increases.
The fact is that voters have no faith that DPS is doing anything to try to curb costs. Instead, they took federal stimulus money to delay having to make tough decisions. Now they’re in a deeper hole, and they and their “progressive” PAC allies are softening us up for another raid on our wallets.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
