Stephen, when you’ve lost the Washington Post editorial board. . .

The crusade for an education jobs bill, led by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress, has always struck us as more of an election-year favor for teachers unions than an optimal use of public resources. Billed as an effort to stimulate the economy, it’s not clearly more effective than alternative uses of the cash. Yes, school budgets are tight across the country, but the teacher layoff “crisis” is exaggerated. In fact, as happens each year, many teachers who got pink slips in the spring have been notified that they’ll be hired after all. Many layoffs could have been — and indeed have been — avoided by modest union concessions.
As of last school year, the money for 5.5 percent of the 6 million K-12 jobs nationwide came from Washington through the 2009 stimulus; the new money reinforces this dangerous dependency.
Nor does the legislation target areas with the most projected teacher layoffs; Maryland, for example, is slated to get $179 million, yet officials have no estimate of layoffs for the school year that begins in a few weeks. The Baltimore Sun noted in May that “most of [the state’s] school systems are not planning to lay off teachers,” and that several were hiring new ones. No matter: The bill allows school systems to use the money to expand their teaching staffs or even to raise teacher salaries.

This editorial has former New Republic editor Charles Lane’s fingerprints all over it, and it’s dead on. Not only are these continued ad hoc bailouts of state and local governments fueling an unsustainable federal debt-to-GDP ratio, they are discouraging those governments from solving long-festering structural inefficiencies precisely when they stand the best chance of overcoming the institutional and interest-group hurdles that stand in their way.