Heidi Alexander: “When we think about the funding, we need to remember the best things for us to do. They are to stop imposing health care…”

“When we think about the funding, we need to remember the best things for us to do. They are to stop imposing health care mandates on States, which make it impossible for them to pay their bills; and to properly support public education, especially public higher education, which is going to take a terrible blow because of the passage of the health care bill. Thanks to the health care bill, tuition payments for students are going to rise. Second, we should recognize that the stimulus money passed last year was one-time funding. We created this financial cliff and now we have an unprecedented level of debt in the Federal Government. We do not have $23 billion lying around to send to the States. Whether we are sending $230,000 per teaching job, $76,000 per teaching job, or scaling it back and saying we are only going to send the national average, which is $46,000, the question still remains: From whose grandchildren will we borrow the money? We need to reduce the growth of the Federal debt. We should not be bailing out States with another $50 billion.”