Musing of One Wondering What the Chinese Who Invented Gunpowder Did With the First Batch

We saw a news report that a number of state and local governments have unfunded pension liabilities aggragating about $3 trillion, and that they are considering asking the federal government to bail them out. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The states, their legislatures and their unions got themselves into the problem and it's up to them to do whatever they have to do get themselves out. And as a consultant in Chicago who would benefit from such a bailout remarked, "This would help to destroy federalism and should never be done." What we need is some realism.

Musing of One Watching a Man Who, Using a Casting Rod to Fish From a River Bank, Accidentally Snagged a Sunken Log, Thought He Had Hooked a Huge Fish,

and Reeled Himself Into the River

We saw on the news the other day that the Los Angeles school district has just completed a $578,000,000 "Taj Mahal" high school complete with extravagances. This seems to us to be characteristic of the tendency of public bodies to persuade taxpayers to provide funds to allow them to build they want instead of the minimum needed.
Young people should not go to school for fun. It's a tax supported institution, not a free one and young people should go there to learn the skills and develop the self-discipline required to become a productive self-supporting member of society, and for no other reason. This requires only that there be adequate classrooms fully equipped for this purpose. They should be designed to encourage the student to accomplish the goals and move on.
This is this kind of philosophy that has gotten the United States into its current fiscal mess.