This is a shocker.

Gary Rubenstein reports that the state of Texas pays Teach for America $5.5 million a year for 400 recruits. 

This is a sweet deal for TFA but a bad deal for Texas taxpayers.

He writes:

”TFA provides the state with a report that makes it seem like they are doing a lot with this money, but considering that they recruit about 400 corps members into Texas and only 85% of them even finish their two year commitment, this is a big waste of money.  This is about $15,000 per recruit, and that doesn’t include whatever finders fees the districts themselves pay.”

We keep reading glowing stories about the economy but very little about low wages, barely enough to live on.

We read very little about the schools and classrooms that maintain food pantries for families or the teachers who pay for their students’ school supplies.

Here is a teacher in Maynardsville, Tennessee, who maintains a “hygiene cabinet” in her classroom, where students can get free toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, tampons, and other necessities.

Are you listening, Governor Bill Lee? Are you listening, Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Marsha Blackburn?

Now, here is a scary thought, raised by Daniel Block, as editor at Washington Monthly: What happens in 2020 if Trump loses the election but refuses to give up the office? What if he says the election was rigged, hundreds of thousands of illegals voted, and simply says he won’t give  up the presidency? What if the supine Republican party leaders agree with him? What if he challenges the election in court? What if he calls up the armed forces to keep him in office? What if he asks his “Second Amendment people” to barricade the White House?

when I first read this article, it read almost like a satire. Since then, Trump has tweeted that he should get an extra two years added to his first term because of the time “wasted” by the Mueller investigation. His aides say he was only joking. But his craziest ideas begin as jokes, then become reality. We know how little regard he has for the Constitution. He thinks he was elected to be dictator or emperor of president for life.

The scariest part of the questions is that we are even considering this to be a realistic possibility.

An expose in the New York Times revealed that Trump is a financial flop.

“The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.”

James Hohmann of the Washington Post writes about this Times’ story:

The most fascinating passage of the lengthy Times article, deep in the second half, focuses on the three years Trump spent “posing as a corporate raider” from 1986 through 1988. He had overleveraged himself by taking out huge loans at high interest rates and making questionable spending decisions. Two weeks before the stock market crashed in October 1987, for example, Trump bought a 282-foot yacht for $29 million.

The president recognized as a relatively young man – still in his early 40s – that he could profit off his celebrity and perceived business acumen. This was around the time that his book “The Art of the Deal” came out in 1987. He didn’t have the assets to purchase large publicly traded companies, but he knew that other people didn’t know that – especially after he successfully bamboozled Forbes Magazine into wildly overestimating his wealth. He expressed interest and spread rumors that he was looking to acquire companies he knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t.

“Trump made a total of $57 million by briefly presenting himself as a takeover threat to, among others, Hilton Hotels, the Gillette razor company and Federated Department Stores … In all, from 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within one year,” Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig report. “As with many things Trump, his adventures in the stock market were more image than substance, helped greatly by news reports quoting anonymous sources said to have knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions. An occasional quote from an associate — including his stockbroker, Alan C. Greenberg — helped burnish the myth. ‘He has an appetite like a Rocky Mountain vulture,’ Mr. Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, told the Wall Street Journal in 1987. ‘He’d like to own the world.’ In his actions, Mr. Trump was more like a peacock.”

Investors grew wise to Trump’s game – eventually – so it caught up with him and stopped working. In 1989, Trump bought up American Airlines stock and then announced he was thinking about buying the huge company. “I’m very skeptical of everything this man does,” Andrew Geller, then an airline analyst at Provident National Bank in Philadelphia, told the Associated Press.