Corporate welfare... alive and well in Utah
By Curmudgeon
Another boondoggle... this time, a million dollar give-away to an educational publishing company to install computer reading software and special computers in the homes of students... at most, 294 of them statewide. And probably a lot fewer when "installation fees" are added in. This was one of the provisions hidden in the Curtis-Bramble-Valentine omnibus education bill stuffed through in the final hours of the last legislative session. Utah Education Issues has the whole sordid story of the squandering of a million dollars this year on a favored company here.
This entire rigged giveaway is a prime example of what happens when one party has huge majorities in both legislative chambers, a topic also explored this morning in an op-ed piece by LaFray Kelley, Chairwoman of the Weber County Democratic Party. Worth a read. And some thought.
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7 comments:
I want my taxes to go the rich, because someday I might be rich.
This is the kind of good old finacial conservatism that I vote GOP for every election.
I just hope that one day they pick my company to give the money to.
The SL Trib has an editorial today, endorsing Sen. Bramble's opponent in the coming election, which also discusses the Omnibus Education Bill as an example of what results from one-party government in the legislature. From the editorial:
The hugely unpopular voucher law, which Bramble sponsored, passed by a single vote and later was overturned by a citizen referendum. Bramble and others fought the referendum publicly and with backdoor maneuvering. Public opinion, he told The Tribune Editorial Board, is only one consideration when he's legislating. A rather unimportant consideration, it appears. He gave the same consideration to his colleagues when he and other Republican leaders crafted Senate Bill 2, an omnibus education bill that included three individual pieces of legislation that had already been defeated in the House or Senate. The constitutionality of that bill is being challenged, and severallegislators are among the plaintiffs.
The full SL Trib editorial can be found here.
So Curm, I assume you will be voting for Bishop for US House in order to keep the Dems from have "huge majorities in both legislative chambers"?
overly:
Nice try, Overly. But under the best probable outcome for the Dems, they will not have huge majorities in either the House or the Senate after Tuesday. The lop-sidedness in the Utah House runs on average about 80% Republican to 20% Democratic, enabling the majority leadership to conduct all significant business behind closed doors [since they write the procedural rules at their whim], and to entirely ignore opposition party views. Nothing within screaming distance of that kind of legislative dominance will result even from the rosiest conceivable outcome for God's Party [the Democrats of course] Tuesday.
I will cancel the Ogden paper and subscribe to the Tribune if they can write editorials like this. How refreshing!
Bramble is a snake-in-the-grass.
The problem is that we have to get rid of Speaker Curtis and the Senate Leader if we are going to clean up what goes on at the Legislature.
Thanks for further publicizing this giveaway of public funds Curmudgeon. I missed something in my original post. It's $1 million this year, and $2.5 million more for several more years after that:
A numbers mistake about the cost of the Waterford program in SB 2—It’s worse than I thought…and further illustrates why the omnibus bill is misleading
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