I think everything should be looked at. Perhaps rather than forcing counties to consolidate you could make it legal for them to share some services or even combine some of those mandated jobs.

I think if the benefits are there people will make the right choice. But as with school consolidation there’s a trade off between having a larger school district and keeping the kids a bit closer. Both of those things are relatively good.

What about county consolidations, township boards, legislative district etc..

I don’t think any of us conservatives have been happy with the profligate spending out of this administration and the Republican congresses we’ve had in recent years.

That said the problem has been they’ve been acting too much like Democrats so it doesn’t leave us that much choice.

That’s why it’s important to get involved at the primary level to get more conservatives there.

Government spending absolutely stimulates the economy.
look at Government salaries alone. What do those folks do with the money? They buy houses, cars, groceries, stocks…they have medical costs, they run small business’s….

Post wwII you saw the begining of the baby boomer generation…suburbs, cars, the spending of the GI’s coming home significantly impacted the post depression era.

I think you have to prove that the Puzzled Plan will actually save money.

For one the smaller school districts are better at spending (per pupil) than larger school districts.

How would consolidating those districts requiring new construction perhaps save money.

Also the small counties are very efficient at least when it comes to law enforcement.

Spending per head is worse in the larger cities as far as I can tell.

I’m curious how much of that spending is on social service employees because for every program the dems create, we need two people to sign people up to said program, then someone in Bismarck needs to hire four more people to send the checks out.

Educational spending has gone up due to NCLB.
The really wonderful part about the new expenditures are that the dollars do not go to children, teachers, administrators or schools. These new expenses go to the three major “test makers”.
The publishing companies that create the tests, print the tests, ship the tests, evaluate the tests, and report data back to the districts are reaping huge profits. This administration has created a new money hungry machine with increased standardized testing.

The great thing is that schools are only half way into the plan. Within the next few years these profits for the companies will double as more grade levels are tested in more subject areas.

This is a good thing we say. We need to hold schools accountable. We need to make sure that kids is getting good educations (or however GW phrased it)

Well schools have had standardized tests for at least the past 50 years. Now we just have more… a lot more. Standardized testing of all students does a lot of things. One of the most tragic is the lowering of the educational bar.

You can give away all the vouchers you want. That will not solve the problem. It will help those that can take the voucher (and a significant personal wad of cash) and send their child to a private school. Which will leave the public schools with fewer students that care, and fewer parents that care.

Therefore we’d actually be richer because we wouldn’t have so many parasites passing paper back and forth bothering us that are producing value in the public sector.

Well said…

The contrarian and/or curmudgeon in me notices ag and forestry and fishing and hunting all together are less than medical or wholesale or retail or manufacturing or combined information and professional/tech –
Question 1: what percentage of the 6.3% is directly attributable to Federal subsidies (or are the subsidies included in Government?
Question 2: why am I constantly told that Ag is the only important sector in the ND economy?

Here’s a couple of places to start reductions:

Reduce the number of legislative districts to 40.
Right now each district has about 13,000 citizens on average. Check out other states and their ratios.
Reduce the number of counties from 53 to say 40.
eg.: 1. Billings and Golden Valley, 2.Slope, Hettinger, Bowman, and Adams, 3. Emmon,logan and McIntosh, 4. Cavalier, Pembina and Walsh 5. Benson Ramsey and Pierce. Just for starters. No need for county commissioners, county deed recorders etc.

Mandate school consolidations. With rural schools losing populations, can’t we do better on this taking into consideration long bus times for kids.

Reduce township boards.

Now watch the squealing begin.

Instead of just saying Wow, ND government is the biggest employer, look at all levels of government as I think most here are just looking at the state government when there are many levels of government in ND. And I’ll bet that if you ask the average taxpayer if they want to get rid of their legislative district and make it bigger or if they want to consolidate their country government or school district there will be a resounding NO.

Most people in North Dakota collect a government check.

HEY! That’s not fair. What about me!

Government spending absolutely stimulates the economy.

That’s a misconception if not an outright lie. Government spending contributes nothing to the economy since all it does is redistribute wealth.

Moron, your taxes are what pays for government spending. Think how the economy would be stimulated if people didn’t have to pay taxes.

Right or wrong the gov. has hired a whole lot of people.

And what do those people produce? They aren’t growing grain or raising livestock. They aren’t building anything. They aren’t creating.

They administering, and while a certain amount of that is a necessary evil, every new bureaucrat represents a new burden on the people who are actually creating value in the economy.

I think we should look at why education spending has gone up $600,000,000+ a year with 16,000 fewer students.

But I’ll get Puzzled would start squawking if we went after that. The real solution to the school problems is not consolidation or anything like that. It’s vouchers. Give the people the power over their own education money and let the chips fall where they may.

That probably sounds atrocious to “the government knows best” people like Puzzled, but I’ve always trusted in the collective wisdom of the people.

I’m kind of weird like that.

As far as fewer legislators, I sort of like the idea of each legislator representing fewer people. Makes them more accessible, easier to influence.