Those boys and girls that are pushing this tax don’t care about the children. No, sir, they just don’t. Here’s why.
I was perusin’ the Mayor’s spiel on the subject and she says that no one will be exempt, other than those “entities” that are protected by state law. Someone from down the row in the trailer park told me that meant that churches and schools had to pay up. Well, now I know for a fact that some of them heathens in the park don’t much care that my church might have to pay more. Besides, I’m kinda in between churches right now, you know? Although this ol’ boy seems a mite upset about his church having to fork over $34,000 a year. But why in the world would schools have to pay more taxes? Why would a school, which is built, staffed, and run with tax money have to fork over some of that tax money to someone else? Isn’t that what they call “double taxation”? Not to be confused with double-wide, mind you.
So here’s the deal. I just went to an education forum and listened to three school superintendents whine about not having enough money. I asked myself, self, if they don’t have enough money now, why in tarnation would we take more from them?
I went to the Houston Independent School District’s web site and found a document that says they have 298 different schools. Sho-nuff bigger’n Pasadena when I was learnin’. I checked out a few elementary schools, a few middle schools, and a few high schools on the Harris County Appraisal District web site to see how much land they owned. Did you know some of them schools are upwards of 10 acres? Then I did some calculatin’.
I already knew that 1 acre equals 43,560 square feet because you need to know how many cows you can put in a pasture if you want to fatten’ ’em up just right. Now here is where I sorta cheated, being lazy and all. I used 5 acres as the average land size for those 298 schools. Then I guessed again and used 2/3 for the amount of “impervious surfaces”, that being buildings, parking lots, tennis courts, etc. And I used the Mayor’s tax amount estimate of $0.032 per square foot. Here is how it looks on paper:
298 x 5 x 43,560 x 0.667 x $0.032 = $1,385,319.51
Whoa. Them boys over at Renew Houston are wantin’ a MINIMUM of $1.4 million from HISD. Just to check my cipherin’, I called up this ol’ boy that I know who is one of them financial genius types and asked him what he thought. He tells me I’m on the right track but that their cipherin’ has the bottom line figure closer to $10 million. Sheesh, that would be a down payment on a football stadium at Cy-Fair. I decided to let that ol’ boy tell you how he gets to the higher number, I’ll stick to my “conservative” number. You know, because that’s what I am. Conservative.
I went back to the Houston ISD website and found that the starting salary of a teacher is $44,987 per year. Now, them bein’ union and all it costs quite a bit more than that to actually employ them, so let’s move that number up by 50{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986}. Let’s see, that would be, hmm, $67,480.50, per year. Now here comes the hard part, that division stuff: $1,385,319.51 divided by $67,480.50 equals 20.5 and since I’ve never seen a half teacher, we’ll round that down to 20. At a minimum, 20 teachers will lose their jobs because of this tax, which is actually a double-tax, because you’ve already paid at home and now you are paying at school.
That just don’t seem right. Layin’ off teachers like that. And if that ol’ boy I talked to is right, there’s gonna be about 150 teachers on the street lookin’ for work. And if all of them teachers are teaching younguns, that could be as many as 150 x 22 = 3,300 of them little fellers walking the halls without a teacher.
What are them boys at Renew Houston thinkin’? Puttin’ teachers on the streets and young-uns in the halls just so’s they can put money in their pockets. Shame on them.
I say VOTE NO on PROP 1 and say YES to the children.
Visit The Problem with Prop 1 for more details.