Education Funding, why so low? Educational Crisis in US

I haven't kept up with this thread. ... But one contributor (and a major one) is that we are taxing people to the hilt at the local level, and we the revenue doesn't keep up with obligations we recklessly saddled ourselves with 1, 2, 3, decades ago due to politicians buying off constituents and in the process selling out the future. That means taxes are high, but that money doesn't go to current needs -- which they are frantically cutting. That includes education spending. In particular, we have a massive pension crisis coming, and a lot of it is going to be at the state government level.

The New York Times did a decent piece last week, using Oregon to illustrate why "states and cities are short on cash." What astounded me, because I have followed this for a long time, is that Oregon isn't nearly in the worst shape. ... yet, the picture the story painted is brutal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/business/pension-finance-oregon.html

The piece pointed out that level of dishonesty that is now needed to get taxes through. For example, in San Francisco, the school board wanted voters to approve a $298 "parcel tax" on real estate, and sold it as them raising $50 million to pay teachers "a living wage." The reality is that the school district's retirement costs have grown by $50 million in just the last 5 years, taking away resources tax payers assume should go to teacher salaries.

In Oregon, the piece touches on the Three Rivers school district. ... Oregon's pension system, PERS, is run at the state level, but they bankroll it by levying obligatory contributions from local governments. They saddled themselves with ridiculous (and they were ridiculous when they were doing this over several decades, but nobody gave a shit -- it was a "future" problem) pension costs that would come due. So this year, that school district actually received its first increase in state education funding in years -- its enrollment is growing. But at the same time, Oregon raised the amount that the district had to contribute to PERS by 50 percent. The net result: The superintendent had to lop 5 days off the school year, cut its budget by 10 percent and lay off the district librarian and English specialist.

That Times piece is narrow in scope, but its worth reading for anyone interested. Because this is going to be the primary issue in America within the next decade. It's way more multi-facted that just the stupidity of the past creating a bill that is now coming due, in ways that story doesn't get into. Notably (my common refrain, because so much traces to this), we have spent decades now (and the last decade in particular), with a central bank that robbed savers to encourage more and more debt -- to create the appearance of economic growth (when what they were creating was an artificial credit boom). That ultimately hurts a number of types of people, but pensions were one of the biggest losers. Start with the fact that many pensions made unrealistic promises in the first place (due to political corruption to buy off constituents). Then add in the fact that with nominal interest rates constantly being price administered below the real rate, it makes it impossible for a pension to rely on the risk-free rate of return to grow its contributions without taking on excessive risk (which ultimately ends in disaster). And it has left 1) underfunded pension funds, 2) effectively being robbed of return by a price administrator to encourage others to take on more and more debt. We are going to reach a point where those pensions are going to be in major crisis and there are going to be high-profile examples of pensions not being able to meet the obligations they promised. At the public level, trying to stay on that treadmill (where we are at now) is a BIG reason that education funding isn't there. The money is going to pay for past promises that were made without regard to the future.