The day after was the Facebook IPO. With the company valued at around $100 billion, an unprecedented amount, the IPO created a lot of personal wealth for many Californians. That means they may be paying a lot of taxes. Back of the envelope calculations indicated that California might get a windfall of $2 billion over the current and coming fiscal years. The previous big listing of this type was Goggle in 2004, which led to about $7 billion in tax revenue over the subsequent three years.

I have a hard time understanding how a state that has such positive financial events can’t make its budget work. There is nothing like this happening in the other 49 states. There just aren’t any $100 billion IPOs in Texas or Florida. And yet, we can’t seem to make our state work.

Perhaps it is this kind of occasional windfall in California that makes our budget system and state politics so dysfunctional. The state relies much more on personal capital gains taxes than any other state. Revenues therefore are unpredictable, can’t be scheduled and are dependent on factors completely outside the government’s control. Not a good way to run your shop, is it?

Perhaps we need to wait for the next Google or Facebook to invest again in education? A sad prospect.

With the cuts of recent years, we have started the process of dismantling our educational system. Expected cuts in future years are Draconian and will do serious damage which it will take decades to overcome.

In 2012, California is in rank 42 in per pupil spending. Below California are Arizona, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah. Per pupil spending for 2010/11 for California is $8,689. Rank #1 is New York with $17,750, twice the amount of California.

In 2012, it costs $44,563 to incarcerate a prisoner for a year in California, the highest cost in the nation. That cost is almost the price of a year at Harvard University with room and board. The average cost per prisonor for the U.S. is $28,817. We are currently building the best prisons in the country. We’re doing to prisons now what we did to education in the 1960ies.

So let me get this right:

We went from #5 to #42 in education.

We are at #1 in prison expenses.

A society’s values are reflected by the things it spends its money on. If I drive a Hummer, a minivan, a Prius or a 1965 VW Beetle, you are going to draw conclusions about my lifestyle and my values.

Right now – in California – we’re building prisons and we’re dismantling education, systematically, ruthlessly.

I have collected this information from several disconnected sources and established the table. It does not show all nations, and the numbers are also not 100% accurate. For instance, some countries, like Belgium and Germany, have different states that actually have numbers that vary slightly up or down.

I have tried to be as accurate as possible and include all of the more influential nations today.

Look at the chart and correlate where children spend a lot of  time in school and  where the nation has a lot of influence.

Japan was the Wunderkind of the 1980 and 1990ies and it transformed the world in technology, computer and automobile output. Toyota, Sony, Honda, Mitsubishi.

Germany is the financing arm of Europe today. Airbus, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Zeiss, SAP.

China – just about everything manufactured in the world, and 80% of what is sold at Wal-Mart, is made in China. Need I say more?

The United States are toward the bottom of the list. If the United States wants to hold on to its edge in the world it needs to fund education more seriously. It needs to send its kids to school more days. This starts with early education and preschool. It goes through K-12 and on with universities. Right now, many other countries are gaining an edge over the United States simply by expending more effort on education of all categories. The United States still has the world’s most desired universities. In the past decades, students came to the United States to study, and often they stayed. More and more, they go home after they are done, to India, to China, to Russia and all other countries.

This edge in university education will not last forever. There are, right now, 360 colleges under construction in China. I believe that in another 20 years, students from all over the world will go to China for an education, because that’s where the opportunities will be. That’s where unfettered access to information will sponsor science without shackles. Scientists that want to learn about cloning, genetics and other research dependent on simple things like stem cells will have to go to China.

Education, not oil pipelines, not birth control restrictions, not the stock market, not capitalism, holds our future. The education of our children will either save this nation’s glory, or it will destroy it.

Unfortunately, education is like a 30-year-mortgage. It takes an entire generation of investing and paying before the debt is paid off and the investment comes to fruition. I am old enough that I will not see the result. Will America pull out of it? Or will we be an intellectual and financial debtor nation to China?

However, what strikes me is that it is astonishing that California can’t do better than it does with its money, given that most tech businesses either start here or move here shortly after they start up to grow. I don’t even need to do research to just rattle some off:

SpaceX, Tesla, Google. LinkedIn went through an IPO last year. Most of the Internet companies are in California. Facebook was started in a Boston dorm room and rather than taking it “home” to upstate New York, they moved the company to California in 2005 to grow up.

There is no other state in this country that has this kind of high-end influx of brains, money, creativity and overall economic activity. With all this new money, how can this state be on the bottom of the list in terms of its government budget?

We should be rich.

Many people today lump childcare subsidies in with all other “entitlement benefits,” not recognizing that there are many positive factors. Childcare has been proven to be an important benefit that helps people move out of poverty.

When childcare benefits are cut for the poorest single mothers who are holding on to a job, they frequently end up giving up the job to stay home and take care of their children – what other choice do they have? The money they can make often simply is less than the cost of childcare without subsidy.

Critics often decry the conditions, blame the mothers for having the children in the first place when they can’t afford them, ask for where the fathers are, state that they don’t believe the public should be  responsible, the list goes on.

None of those criticisms make any difference for that single mother today. She’s in the situation she is in, and she has to quit her job and — sigh — end up on welfare simply to eat and not become homeless. The public money is being spent anyway, yet, now the mother is not working and contributing to society productively.

Childcare subsidies are proven to make a difference for many, many reasons:

• Children in quality care in their early years have much better success in school later
• Adults that received quality childcare and good elementary education as children are less likely to end up in prison
• Parents are working while children are cared for under the terms of the subsidy programs
• Parents are working more effectively since they are not worried about their children
• Children in care create jobs for childcare providers, teachers and teacher’s aids

It should be a society’s primary responsibility and objective to educate its young to the fullest extent possible. That starts at birth. The first five years are the most important years in a person’s development. We as a society should be interested that our children, all of our children, have the best start we can possibly give them.

This, in my opinion, ranks ahead of shooting missiles into countries like Libya or sending soldiers into Afghanistan. A single Tomahawk missile costs $1.45 million. The cheapest version costs $575,000 each. The cuts in Missouri are described as:

The Senate Appropriations Committee cut about $7 million of existing federal and state funding for child-care services, eliminated $5 million of the requested increase in state funds and also cut about $13 million that had been used for grants to child-care providers and other things besides direct subsidies for children.

On March 19, 2011, we lobbed 112 missiles into Libya. At a cost of $575,000 per missile (probably more since they are the modern version), this cost us $64.4 million for the missiles alone. You can do the math and figure out how many years of childcare subsidies could have been saved in Missouri alone.

The worth of a society is established by the things it values. I question the priorities of our society that apparently values death and destruction in a despotic desert nation in Africa above the education of its children and the security of the poorest of the poor in its own heartland.

In the ruling, Judge Lindman said the administration overreached because child care providers don’t have a direct employee-employer relationship with the state. He said the state Bureau of Mediation Services (BMS), which Dayton ordered to conduct the election, only has the authority to get involved with non-public workers in cases involving labor disputes between employers and employees.

Criticizing Dayton for what he called “unconstitutional overreach,” GOP House Speaker Kurt Zellers called the ruling a victory for small business.

This means that KinderWait is running in three different states: California, Massachusetts and North Carolina.

In California, the system runs waiting lists and eligibility lists at the county and agency level.

In Massachusetts, KinderWait is  the state’s consolidated wait list system.

In North Carolina, KinderWait is used as a waiting list and a case management system, tracking cases and issuing Child Care Action Notices. See this post for more information about Wake County, North Carolina’s version.

The premise is simple: Unions have faced losses in membership and are turning to new markets. Their argument is that many childcare providers receive government funds, therefore they are “public employees” and should be organized accordingly.

This is met with resistance from many providers. It also is directly opposed to the philosophy applied by many states that provide subsidized childcare. For instance, the California Department of Education opposes the notion that childcare providers are somehow employees of the state. They are simply vendors that supply a service. Once an agency were to accept that childcare providers are employees of the government, many other complications would arise, including tax withholding, benefits, employment relationships, vacation policies and the like.

These complex legal issues have not stopped unionization. It does seem that the rules and details of unionization efforts vary from state to state and there are no two templates alike.

Here is a good article summarizing some of the benefits of good childcare.

It’s the education, stupid!

Of course, it’s easy for us to tell the current population of welfare recipients to just get a job and don’t live off the public dole. It’s not me who is going to benefit thirty years from now when that man is not in prison, who is a little boy in daycare today. It’s my children that benefit.

I, for one, want to live in a society that cares about education at all levels, and that includes childcare. I want to live in a society that puts more value on children than it does on nuclear missiles. That’s why, when my kids were preschool over 20 years ago, I sent them to Montessori schools, and the check for tuition that I had to write every month was one of my most rewarding bills to pay. I knew then that great early education was a sound investment for me and my children, and I know today that likewise, on a macro scale, excellent early education, which includes subsidized childcare, is an investment in the future of our country and society.

And the cycle continues.