The Lakota Levy of 2017: After they try the 2013 attempt
Lakota is currently trying to pass a 2013 tax increase so it probably will come as a shock that the school will be planning a 2017 levy attempt as soon as they can. In the chart shown in the following video, I use another “bullwhip economic” trick to demonstrate how targeted cuts to the Lakota school district could maintain the profitable trend they have shown over the last couple of years. Yet, the school apparently resents greatly their operation of maintaining a budget surplus and has very immediate intentions of escalating their spending as soon as they receive levy passage. In the following chart, the red line represents the tax revenue that the Lakota communities of Liberty Township and West Chester Twp provide to the school. The blue line is the budget for Lakota. Watching this video it will be clear that the recent levy defeats have forced Lakota to bring their costs in line with the tax revenue supplied. As explained, the teacher’s contract the district has with the Lakota Education Association has maintained a wage freeze lasting through 2014. This is why the district has operated in a surplus. However, it is also clear that the intention of the levy of 2013 is to throw money at the new teacher’s contract because the blue line spikes up dramatically and predictably until 2017. The green line is the amount of funding the school intends to inject into their financial dynamics upon levy passage in 2013. As it becomes terribly obvious, the green line and blue line intersect during the year 2017 meaning that Lakota will have to pursue another tax increase at that time.
It is terribly obvious that Lakota has been forced by the voting community to live within their budget with levy failures, which is good. Yet they have been promising that the summer of 2014 would reap a payday to school employees because the blue line spikes sharply upward countering all the positive gains that have been made since 2010 to the present. It was always my intention to bring Lakota’s operating costs in line with community revenue without raising taxes and this chart shows how well the effort has worked. The NO votes have been the most useful tool in forcing the school district to operate the way they should have always functioned, with a keen focus on their expenditures and operating with a slight surplus. But they seem to not have learned their lesson and have been promising their employees large raises in 2014. Their spending projections reflect this as the numbers making up the data on the chart are generated by Lakota’s own statistics. There is a reason they must disclose all their information to the tax paying public—it is for just this type of analysis.
Lakota has been able to maintain a positive balance by making the forced targeted cuts due to the levy failures, which is also reflected on the chart, which is why I find my “bullwhip economic” demonstrations to be so effective. It’s my own unique way of explaining such dry material that has a tendency to bore people to death when they are forced to attend the kind of meetings it takes to ascertain the data that makes up such charts. So I like to put a little metaphorical zip on the information to present it in an entertaining way, otherwise the information goes in one ear and out the other. But relevant to the Lakota levy of 2013 and all future levies, the information couldn’t be clearer. The data speaks for itself. Lakota plans to go on a spending binge in 2014 like pent-up sailors who have been at sea for many months approaching a whore house. The projected numbers that make up the blue line can be obtained from Lakota’s treasurer or anybody involved in the financing structure at the school.
In October of 2013 Lakota will have to produce a new five-year forecast which will involve many of the same numbers seen in the chart discussed during the video. However one thing that has not been yet included in Lakota’s blue line forecast is the grim reality that I have covered extensively which is that Lakota is set to lose another two thousands students between the present time and the year 2022. This will force the layoff of around 80 teachers. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. It will be interesting to see if Lakota includes these declining enrollment numbers into their projections, which they will have to address at some point in time. But for their pro-tax levy attempts, they will hope to bury that information deep in their forecast because it will clearly show that they do not need more money. Instead of the blue line projecting upward, it needs to be in a further decline from where it currently resides.
The frustration, anger, and in-trench warfare that sometimes goes on behind the scenes with the pro levy crowd is predicated directly off their lack of desire to acknowledge the facts driven off numbers shown so clearly in charts like the example I used in the video. I call them “levy addicts, “levy zombies,” and more derogatory “latte sipping prostitutes,” because of their destructive desire to hurt an entire community with corrosive taxation as they belong to a group of people who desire to throw large wages at employees who aren’t needed, but for emotional reasons. The desire to increase taxes for the solitary reason of injecting money into a group of employees that have a perceived value which is too high, or are not needed is simply stupid. Many times the only reason is because the levy supporters are friends with those employees, or hope that by throwing money at the school, the money will off-set their terrible parenting skills. They hope the school will give their children what they can’t because they are plagued with so much self-doubt as individual people; they have nothing to offer their children but social connections and a big mouth that advocates bigger and better schools to teach them in. The root cause of the problem is that those levy advocates do not have faith in their own parenting and hope that they can hide the fact behind their chants for higher taxes, and more community spirit, and they have no restraint in demanding the community fund perpetual increases in the blue line based strictly on emotional neuroses.
It is a shame that so many young reporters who work for the local papers cannot see the benefit of the numbers shown in charts like this example, because many of them are children themselves. This is why they support school levies. If they are under the age of 35, they are likely still new to the ways of the world and do not understand how things connect, so they make their decisions based on pure emotion—on the backs of children who are used by the levy addicts to hide the reality of the blue number—the desire to throw money at district labor based on an anti-trust criteria. (Click Here to Review) Then of course many people find such information daunting, and beyond their grasp. So rather than do the hard work of analyzing data, they choose to subscribe to the emotional position of the levy addicts. That is why the Lakota administrators are working blindly toward a 2013 tax increase knowing full well that another attempt will have to be made in 2017, because they do not target cuts unless forced to with levy failures. Beyond 2017 there is no question that there will be more levy attempts and that within 15 years of this current time Lakota plans to add at least 10 more mills of levy to the current rate of 33, pushing the rate of taxation to a level over 40 mills, which is very unattractive to long-term real-estate investment or business growth. That is why it is reckless, and devastating to a community to insinuate uncontrolled taxation, which is what Lakota is guilty of.
So the tax increases will not end in 2013. They will continue until the school is forced to cut their costs the proper way with controlled cuts made without emotion. Since Lakota will not regulate themselves, they must be forced to with failed levies. The Levy Zombies do not run the community. They are often young people between the ages of 25 and 35 and are functioning from personal insecurities. It is dangerous to allow them to dictate budgets, which is why Lakota believes that nobody will ever challenge their blue line projections well into 2017. The same logic left unchecked will pillage the Lakota community until there is nothing left but a high tax zone of residents and empty business establishments driven away by the bottomless pit hunger of the levy addicts. Against those specimens targeted cuts is the only defense and I use bullwhip economics to highlight the point. But aside from the spectacle of my whip tricks the situation is actually quite serious, Lakota is a parasitic organization that is selling itself as the savior of community value when it is practicing the opposite effect. Under the Lakota plan seen on the chart, the financial imposition that public school will place on the community will be devastating and end the thriving business culture that currently exists. Anyone who supports a school levy is crazy, especially when given the facts that show the proof. The best thing anybody could do for Lakota and the community that surrounds the school is to vote “NO” on the levy and force Lakota to live within its means, instead of their projected path of deficit spending toward a future resulting in economic collapse. The data tells the story. All anybody need do is look at the data to reach the same conclusion.
Rich Hoffman
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