Per Student Funding and Teacher Jobs Cuts Stall the Economy.

As I hear it, we should all be happy Gov. Walker provided the tough love and “tools” to deal with the cost of education and bring about a balanced budget. Ah, but the cuts aren’t over, the shortfalls haven’t ended, and the austerity measures now will look gentle by comparison. 

Remember, we’ve been cutting education and services to the bone for at least ten years, and the tightwad whiners haven’t noticed a thing. Let's face it, they’ll never ever be satisfied. Rest assured, they’ll be the first ones to whine, “private schools don’t want to meet or listen to us.” They're accountable to the bottom line, not us.

But if we’re so worried about our kids future, why are we cutting their education off at the knees? Is it just so they won’t have to pay higher taxes as adults. Sounds like a little tightwad parental projection. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities broke down the numbers:

They described the problem this way;

These cuts are occurring at a time when schools face demands from parents, employers and civic leaders to bring more and more students to higher levels of academic proficiency, in large part because workers will increasingly need higher levels of educational attainment to thrive in the workforce. States' large cuts in spending on education have serious consequences for the economy, both in the short and long term. They also counteract and sometimes undermine important state education reform initiatives, and put upward pressure on local property taxes.

State education budget cuts have deepened the recession and slowed the pace of economic recovery by reducing overall economic activity. The spending cuts have forced school districts to lay off teachers and other employees, reduce pay for the education workers who remain, and cancel contracts with suppliers and other businesses. All of these steps remove demand from the economy.

Local school districts already have eliminated 293,000 jobs nationally since August 2008, federal data show. In addition, education spending cuts have cost an unknown but probably very large number of additional jobs in the private sector as school districts cancel or scale back private-sector purchases and contracts (for instance, purchasing fewer textbooks). These job losses shrink the purchasing power of workers' families, which in turn affects local businesses and slows recovery. While it is not possible to calculate directly the additional loss of jobs resulting from state education budget cuts, it appears very likely that school districts will continue to cut jobs and also to cut funding for some private-sector jobs, negating some of the job growth that otherwise would occur in the economy as a whole.