We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.

Encino and Lanai Road elementary schools are mounting Buccaneer Balls and Pancakepaloozas this month, and Hesby Oaks and Emelita Street hold similar fundraisers occasionally. The amounts raised can be significant, but it’s tiny in the bigger scheme of things. Parents are doing their best to save supplementary programs (coaches, music, art) but now it’s the full-time teachers who are being laid off by state budget cuts.

Fundraisers can’t save public schools.

How appropriate that Alice in Wonderland is opening this weekend, with thousands more teacher layoffs, classes shutting down, students protesting all over the state and cuts in welfare services for the most vulnerable. And it’s going to get worse. No one wants to say it out loud, but if the rich are unwilling to see their taxes go back up and many of the non-rich defend them, then “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

Can we say that the Red Queen’s kids are in private schools and she has access to health care? The trade-off has always been that the Red Queen gets a functional criminal justice system and everyone else gets access to education and welfare. That compact is now broken and it will remain broken till raising taxes is put back on the table.

The most under-reported story in the LA Times over the past few months appeared on January 31, 2010. In a scathing article titled “Public ignorance bites California in the wallet” (here), it was pointed out that 41% of state money goes to K-12 education, 30% to health and human services, 13% to higher education and 10% to prisons (if you’re counting, that’s 94%). The Lottery, by the way, has minimal impact. So if we are cutting both spending and taxes, public education and public health will suffer.

Politicians have taken raising taxes off the table because apparently Californians think it’s a bad idea. But the rich should be called out for their selfishness and indifference. “If you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”