>That obviously puts a massive strain on the school system. Does that really seem all that bizarre and dishonest?

Yes, I think it's dishonest to pretend that the schools are "underfunded" when they are funded at the same/similar dollar amount as other schools or to pretend that poor kids need to have double or triple the amount of money spent on them as non-poor kids.

>I have not found a single website that comes close to your 50 or 100 percent numbers. What source are you getting these numbers from?

I'm just spitballing based on numbers in the inquirer article.

In reality, the philadelphia district and lower merion have roughly the same per student expenses:

https://www.niche.com/k12/d/philadelphia-city-school-district-pa/

https://www.niche.com/k12/d/lower-merion-school-district-pa/

...but the article implies that this number actually would need to be increased thousands more in Philadelphia in order to get up to the state average, or to get to what Lower Merion "spends":

" a need-adjusted measure of what districts actually spend — is $10,796 per student; the state average is $13,688. Lower Merion, by comparison, spells $26,362 per student."

Which gets back to my original point about why this type of analysis is so silly and ridiculous. Measured in dollars (which is how most people measure spending usually...), these districts spend similar amounts but measured in this mysterious "Needs Based Adjusted" metric, the numbers come out wildly different. It just seems dishonest and bizarre.

>homeless

What percentage of Philadelphia public school children are homeless? And how much more does it cost to educate a homeless child than a housed child?

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>lack internet access

Why does this increase the cost to educate children?

The district could literally just pay ~$50/mo to get every family free internet and it would represent like 2% of the total budget.

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>require special education etc.

That is the entire question I'm asking here: what is so "special" about Philadelphia children that they cost 50% or 100% more to educate than suburban children?

>The point is that, on average, it costs more to educate children in Philadelphia, where a large percentage of the population is living in poverty and thus facing a number of externalities that complicate things, than a wealthy suburb.

Why does it cost more? Most of the expenses (teacher/admin salary, books, etc) should be largely the same no matter where they are paid for.

Yeah I find this kind of analysis silly and ridiculous.

"We may be getting the same amount of money as other schools, but when you factor in how much money I actually wish I had, we should be getting much more!"

The point I was trying to make is that it is simply false to pretend like the problem is "federal policies siphoned away money to suburban schools" when the schools are in fact getting more money than suburban schools.

If you think that the schools in the city need/deserve more money than suburban schools, that's a fine argument to make/have, but I'm so tired of hearing about this fantasy of the schools being "underfunded".

We spend ~$20k/student/year, which is more than what most of the suburbs spend.

You're accused of being a troll for not being completely up to date on current cabaret law in the state of Tennessee. These people have totally lost the plot.

>Tennessee Senate Bill 3, known as the Tennessee drag ban,[1] is an anti-drag bill, which [bans](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_(law)) public "adult cabaret performance" in front of children in the state of Tennessee.

Why do we have to pretend to care about this stuff???????? Aren't there more important issues we can be talking about?

>Larger buildings with more occupants will require more services and should pay tax to help cover that.

Remember that everyone in the building will presumably be paying city wage taxes and sales taxes, it's not like they are free-riding.

On balance most of the residents of market rate new housing are going to be contributing much more to the city budget than they are going to be drawing in expenses. We should encourage buildings like this as much as possible.

>Something like taxing land at X and taxing improvements at .25-.5X would motivate landholders to put that land into productive use but also raise revenue as the city takes on new residents who need services.

Most of the advocates of a land value tax would consider something like this a huge win, myself included.

Yes, it registers with me. I think the city would function better if people who can't afford to develop their undeveloped properties sold those properties to people who can afford to develop it. In many cases these properties are worth several hundred thousand or millions of dollars. These are not "poor people" generally.

People sitting on empty lots/abandoned buildings because they either cannot afford to or don't want to develop is a major inhibitor of growth. This behavior should be discouraged through the tax code.

Yes a property tax is essentially just a land value tax + an improvement tax.

Advocates of a land value tax think the land piece should be expanded and the improvement piece should be diminished/abolished.

No, we have a property tax which punishes development.

The key difference between a land value tax and a property tax is that a land value tax does not increase when you develop a property. Imagine an empty lot right next to an apartment building. They are the same dimension. The empty lot and apartment building have the same "land value" and therefore would pay the same land value tax.

An empty plot of land in Rittenhouse is worth more than the same sized empty plot of land in Kensington. Therefore a land value tax will collect more from the Rittenhouse land owner than the Kensington land owner.

The land in nice/rich neighborhoods is more valuable than the land in poor neighborhoods, so the tax burden would still fall disproportionately on the rich with a LTV. It's just now the landowners would not be punished for turning their empty lot into an apartment building or business.

I'm not saying "the problem is we don't arrest enough people". I'm saying "stop arresting people" is not a serious strategy to fight poverty.

Correlation does not imply causation. The US is a very different country than most of our low-crime European peers. We have orders of magnitude more guns, violence and crime. Hence it should not be a surprise that our incarceration rate is higher.

There are certainly arguments to be made that we incarcerate way too many people for, e.g., drug related offenses, but a blanket policy of "stop arresting people" seems like pure insanity to me.

The idea that incarcerating violent criminals is a primary cause of poverty is completely insane, imo

Just have to put up with decades of violent crime and rising murder rates, then obviously everything will get magically better for reasons, yeah makes perfect sense