Yes, I realize it’s not exactly apples-to-apples, but I still find a certain phrase dancing through my head after reading this story and this one in today’s paper.
USC will consider $85 million for sports, but not one million for clean air.
It vaguely reminds me of something a famous South Carolinian once said to the French. But what he said made more sense.
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The system by which the SC universities spend ZILLIONS of dollars on whiz bang projects while K through 12 suffer…is beyond my comprehension.
I would respectfully use the word “sinful” in referring to how the “educated and powerful elite” feather their reputations and fancies with our dollars. Shame, shame, shame.
A well intentioned newspaper could curb the appetites of these Barons of higher education and even higher spending …but alas, it is not to be so. And we are poorer for this.
Chris
When you say “our dollars,” I assume you’re either a lottery player or a major-league donor to colleges.
K-12 (at least in poor, rural areas) is underfunded, something that this newspaper HAMMERS and HAMMERS on day after day. If you’ve missed that you must not have a subscription, and I recommend you get one.
Something else you might have missed is that underfunded as they may be, primary and secondary schools get almost all their support from taxes — local, state and (to a far lesser extent) federal.
Meanwhile, our “public” universities get less than a quarter of their funding from taxpayers. The rest comes from tuition — which has been jacked up dramatically by the inflationary effect of lottery-funded scholarships — and private contributions.
Sammy Fretwell’s article omits some basic facts, rendering it of little informational value. All we know is that someone claims the proposed emission controls might have “reduced emissions 90%”, but from what levels? That is the key piece of information that is missing.
This is typical of pollution articles. Those who want “stricter emissions” for automobiles are mostly unaware that vehicle emissions have been decreased by 97% from 1970 to 1990. It will cost billions to get the next 1/2% reduction, and it may create more manufacturing pollution to achieve that than the tailpipe emission reduction.
our “public” universities get less than a quarter of their funding from taxpayers. The rest comes from tuition — which has been jacked up dramatically by the inflationary effect of lottery-funded scholarships”
Brad, the effect from lottery-funded scholarships has been minor and only continues in the vein of all the other government support that’s been flowing into our colleges and universities by various routes for at least 3 decades. That government support is precisely why tuition has been going through the roof year after year after year. The colleges know that parents will be yelling for their politicians to “do something”. Then every time our politicians try to “help” us with yet another tuition subsidy, the additional money is immediately soaked up by tuition increases the next year and the vicious cycle continues.
At this point, the best thing we as a state and a nation could possibly do would be to abolish all government support except guaranteed student loans. Once parents and prospective students see that they will have to pay for or pay back every single dollar they spend on a college education they will be much more circumspect in exactly how they spend that money. Faced with suddenly tightfisted customers, our freespending universities will have no choice but to throttle back on their frivolous expenditures.
I’m not convinced that the $1 million would be money wellspent but I have no doubt that the $85 million is an absolute waste. However, the Columbia area seems to have a singular talent for throwing money at multiple stadiums, convention centers and other white elephants, none of which will ever make back their investment and all of which are vastly underutilized. Black holes one and all, yet all the bien-pensant elitist do-gooders spare no effort at pushing them through one way or the other. This will be no different. I wish I could say otherwise.
Brad…
U seem a little testy about my comments. Sorry to have riled your prickly nerve.
The 25% rule is fine in direct tax dollars…and of course that is enough to warrant my comment. But the indirect monies through a multitude of subsidies, tax plans, allotments to other agencies that come back to the university in other ways, special legislation and debt protection …amounts to a lot more money FROM the taxpayer TO the higher Ed folks.
I will make a few phone calls to my betters and write more tomorrow.
Cheers…
While the University of South Carolina has turned out many terrific graduates, it is still one of the most arrogant institutions of higher learning I have ever seen.
USC is closed-off and aloof, and gives very little back to the community. If you’ve ever spent time in other college towns, you’d see how others really open up their campus and have a positive influence on the cultural life of the community.
But USC gets away with it because of all the Gamecock fans out there, and the fact that USC sports is one of the only games in town.
And they get away with a lot more than most people realize– well beyond clean air– because of their powerful lobbying interests downtown.
Woodburning certainly is the energy source of the future…hey and past too! Way to look forward by doing the same old thing, USC Energy crew! Ah the wonders of a wood fire – could the poor shivering cavemen have ever dreamed of such a modern source of energy? A quiet, clean burning renewable source of heat like methane clearly should take a back seat to a smouldering pile of wood chips dumped out of a truck at 5 in the morning. Woo-hoo! Or maybe I should say beep-beep-beep-beep….
Who is the dimwit who came up with this scheme?
If more facilities switch to burning wood chips, you can be certain that loggers will take out more and more pulp timber to grind into chips. This is the environmentalist nightmare. Paper mills use the chips to make print, so in the end newsprint could go up. Everything affects everything as they say. But if I lived in the neighborhood of the new woodburners, I would soon be installing better air filtration. They will need it.
We do seem to throw a lot of money away on unnecessary projects in Columbia. If I was king of Columbia my focus would be removing the railroad tracks on Assembly Street. It would cost a bit of money up front but the savings in gasoline and time would eventually pay for the project. Enough of the endless beautification and arena projects until this basic infrastructure need is addressed.
One correction to your post,Brad.Football is not a “sport”,it’s a spectacle.
Hey Lee,
Do us a favor and lock yourself in your garage with your car running, and then get back to us about harmful emissions.
Lee should change his username to “Weird Science”
Preston and bill, I take it, are unfamiliar with the basic facts about pollution which I mentioned above, and are unable to respond to those facts. Why do people who know very little about the science and history of envrionmental issues think they should be voting to impose ignorant laws, nullifying the votes of scientists and engineers?
Dave: Newsprint “could” go up?
Our price went up by double digits in the first six months of this year, compared to the same period in ’05. This had a major impact on us at a critical time. As you may know, our industry has two big expenses: labor and newsprint.
I have long thought (and by “long,” I mean going back to the early 80s, when neither I nor most of the people I knew had personal computers) it would be great if we could go completely on line.
But we can’t, because too many people still want their news on paper. Which is good, but it still leaves us at the mercy of the shifting price of that commodity.
Lee, we know you are an engineer. That has very little to do with the science of pollution. I merely made a comment that I thought you could learn a little something through the experiment that I proposed.
Unlike you, I do not claim to know everything. I merely have the uncanny abilty to smell shit, as our president says, and recognize its source.
Brad, sorry for the expletive, but if it’s good enough for GW, it’s good enough for me.
We must all look out because I am not sure if the internet is large enough to contain Lee’s ego.
Preston, I don’t KNOW if spending an extra $1,000,000 on pollution controls at one USC facility is worthwhile. Neither do you. Neither does Sammy Fretwell, or Brad Warthen.
Investments in pollution control are a science and business decision for me, but a matter of religious faith to some folks, especially when not spending their own money.
As I predicted in a previous post, the economic boom continues to pump tax revenues into the state coffers. Thank God that Bobby Harrell and the rest of the legislature are home, and unable to spend all of it for a few more months.