College kids fleeing to other states

My parents’ generation started payment, in the form of taxes, on the California college system we have today. Neither of my parents attended school past the eighth grade. The learned to see an education as the difference between succeeding and not, and were glad to pay the taxes to build and fund the system that all three of their children attended.

My generation continued paying for California’s college system, and until the last decade, an education in a California state college, university or community college was very reasonable.

I greatly resent the decades of state legislative oversight of our state budget, which has indebted our state to the point that those we elected to run our state now feel justified in stripping from the people of California access to the affordable college system WE funded.

It is short-sighted, and serves only the best interests of those who did NOT pay, by their California payroll taxes, for the California college system. What has made us strong as a state–our educated workers–is being taken from this generation, and future generation, by politicians whose motto seems to be “I got mine, who cares about you.” In the process, these short-sighted “me-first” fools are bankrupting the future of our state.

It is the same policy of “poverty-through-ignorance, now and in the future,” that defined the lives of many of our parents who did not have access to college education.

Without an educated business- and work-force, California will never return to its glory days. We will, like the rest of the country, simply sink further and further into a third-world reality, where the masses of uneducated poor suffer while those who “got their’s” –from the college system we funded, when the education we provided to them was still affordable–are able to thrive, prosper, and rise to positions where they will make the decisions that keep us uneducated and send overseas the jobs we create in the U.S. overseas here in the U.S..

I resent the the state giving priority to nonresident students, just because they pay more in tuition. My parents and my generation PAID for the system they are now selling to the highest bidder.

I resent the back-of-the-hand slap-in-the-face payment we received for generations of California taxpayers creating and funding the college system our children cannot afford.

I resent politicians telling us we need a “bullet-train-to-nowhere” while our state’s children fight for jobs at Burger Kings because the college system California taxpayers created has been run into the ground by the politicians and administrators we handed it off to.

It’s not just Paso Robles whose legislating body and administration has its priorities upside down. We see it in other cities, local government agencies, counties and at the state level, as well.

In Paso Robles, the citizens have watched their city be run into the ground by its city councils and city administrators. Some of the PR residents have decided to seek change in the form of voting into the city council a majority of council members who do not serve their cronies first and the citizens they represent last, if ever.

Some PR citizens believe that, until this majority is in place, the current city council and city manager–in whom so many PR residents have no faith–should not be allowed to make major decisions, such as new funding measures and selecting the new police chief. They believe allowing the same people who ran the city into the ground to make such important decisions, which will instill enormous power in individuals, at an enormous debt for the PR taxpayers, to be folly.

I believe California voters should take the same approach.

We should not vote to authorize any funding, via tax or other measure, until we vote out of office the politicians who are now in office and have continued the course of running our state–and its college system– into the ground.

Once we have voted into office politicians who will serve the best interests of the people first, and the demands of their cronies last, we can then work with our elected legislators on the changes the California voters believe are needed in our state.

The idea of continuing to empower our state legislators, who turn around and use it to make their special-interest supporters richer, has been tried and it has failed miserably….at the expense of the California taxpayers.

It is time to try something new. As a good start, I would recommend NOT giving the self-serving fools in California government, who got us where we are now, any more power or funding to make it worse. Instead, we should vote into office politicians who are not beholding to special-interest cronies, and who are willing to work WITH the taxpayers to find solutions the TAXPAYERS can support.