Yet Another Reason Not to Like HB1410 and SB5444

From The Oregonian, via Horse's Ass:

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman gave a far more dire economic forecast in Portland last week than Oregon experts continue to present.

Krugman, a Princeton University economics professor and columnist for The New York Times, predicts — at a minimum — several years of a depressed economy. He calls the recession’s resemblance to the Great Depression “extremely frightening” and finds new signs of collapsing global trade shocking.

That vision starkly contradicts the opinions of Oregon economists, who generally predict the economy will bottom out this year and begin recovery in 2010. The discrepancy is partly philosophical, but could also reflect pressures on local economists to avoid presenting nightmare scenarios.

Making wholesale changes in the education system with the promise of future funding is a stupid thing to do when there's a very real chance that the 2010 legislative session could be just as difficult as this one is and 2011 may be flat.

I understand what the League of Education Voters is getting at, that this really could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink how we do the entire system. What I see is one long series of expensive changes without a financing mechanism to make them happen, and that's the poison pill that should give any one of our legislators enough reason to vote no.