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The premise of the post is right, but there are multiple stages it has to go through depending on the politician.
Fear stage: "We're going to have to cut services like police and fire." This works well in hell holes (any large city).
More Fear Stage: "We're going to have to cut other services like medicaid, snow plows, police, fire, and other stuff that the general public doesn't use anyway."
Drag the teachers in Stage: "Schools are going to have to eat the bullet on this one." Unsurprisingly, the general public has seen the outright failure that is most public schooling and doesn't rush to their checkbooks but coupled with the rest of the fear, they usually relent more of their hard earned.
Only rarely does it get past the above point.
The only people with the eggs to go past the above point are people that are serious about the budget. That's when you see the axe fall. Colleges are spared most of the brunt because they can simply raise tuition to keep the deans rolling in cash and the political donations flowing. Public schools, not so much.
What else are you going to do? You can't force people to pay for shit they don't want to. You can't continue to subsidize failing institutions that are as resistant to reform as health care. Amtrak is a miserable failure almost everywhere around the US. We spent 20 billion subsidizing the train company this year. The amount they need to stay solvent grows every year by roughly 1.3 billion. 20 billion would put quite a few people into medicare that don't have health insurance. 20 billion would be a nice shot in the arm of public schools to get some decent teachers into the system (because like in the case of global warming, money makes everything better every time. I guess they shred it and blow it across the arctic to insulate the snow. That's just a guess though. I was educated in a public school after all.)
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