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Originally Posted by jkeene
Wow! I looked up my county's budget lines for library services. $6.3M for a population of 400,000, or about $15 per capita. We have no DVDs at all, no Overdrive either, just NetLibrary for ebooks. The core physical book selection is decent, but all the branches are completely closed every Friday.
I've twice written my county commissioner to protest proposed library cuts, looks like I should be pushing for an increase.
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Wow, that seems small - my county has a population of just over 900,000, giving us a per capita cost of about $45, and while I think our libraries are good, I think that there's a lot of room for improvement, too.
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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Exactly. The real complaint behind the push for vouchers and private schools comes down to this. The more affluent just don't want to pay not only enough in taxes to support quality schools for their children, they resent being taxed the additional amount necessary to fund schools of the same quality for children of the less affluent who otherwise would not have access to such schools.
American's are inherently a individualistic selfish “what's in it for me?” bunch.
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Some of this is true, but it's more complicated than this. Some schools, especially inner city schools, are just disaster areas, having dropout rates of well over 50% - in some cases over 70%. The wealthy and upper middle class who live in these areas either move to suburbs or send their kids to private schools. The middle class who can't afford private schools have moved to the suburbs. This leaves the lower middle class and below with no option but to send their kids to these horrible schools. That's why there is also a lot of support for voucher-type programs among lower middle class and below parents.
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One of the big reason libraries are under such financial stress and budgets are tight is that taxes are at the lowest levels that they have been in 30 years. Yet people still compain at being over taxed.
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This is true enough. But in a democracy you have to justify expenditures, and convincing the 80% of people who don't read much that they should pay $150/year to subsidize the reading habits of others can be a hard sell. I'm amazed that libraries have done as well as they have, frankly.