A Question for America

A question for Americans.

Senator Bernie Sanders on the Insanity of Our National Spending and Priorities

It seems only Senator Bernie Sanders, out of everyone in Congress, understands and elucidates both how skewed and wrong and out of kilter our national spending and priorities are and what they should be.



Truth to power.

Push to cut the defense budget.

And mightily.

We will still be strong. In fact, we would actually be stronger yet, internally and externally.

America's national priorities, redux

Who we are, what we're doing

Education on public employee spending

Check out what position, by state, is the highest paid position for publicly-paid employees:

More of our priorities. This time, by state as well as the entire nation.

They make great points on this, too, naturally:

There are at least three problems.

 

--Coaches don't generate revenue on their own; you could make the exact same case for the student-athletes who actually play the game and score the points and fracture their legs.

 

--It can be tough to attribute this revenue directly to the performance of the head coach. In 2011-2012, Mack Brown was paid $5 million to lead a mediocre 8-5 Texas team to the Holiday Bowl. The team still generated $103.8 million in revenue, the most in college football. You don't have to pay someone $5 million to make college football profitable in Texas.

 

--This revenue rarely makes its way back to the general funds of these universities. Looking at data from 2011-2012, athletic departments at 99 major schools lost an average of $5 million once you take out revenue generated from "student fees" and "university subsidies." If you take out "contributions and donations"—some of which might have gone to the universities had they not been lavished on the athletic departments—this drops to an average loss of $17 million, with just one school (Army) in the black. All this football/basketball revenue is sucked up by coach and AD salaries, by administrative and facility costs, and by the athletic department's non-revenue generating sports; it's not like it's going to microscopes and Bunsen burners.

 

Way to go, Amerikuh.

 

We're number one.

Link to original post here:

Infographic: Is Your State's Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably)

Crazy priorities

We need to cut defense spending in half, at least.

Then we need to spend at least some of that on people and food and clothing and shelter and medical help.

THOSE are wise priorities.

Money for the war machine, instead of for here, peace and sanity

Go to this link to compare what's been spent on war, instead of having spent it otherwise:

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/tradeoffs