[Andrew Blair]

Originally Posted by Towel

I agree with the person who said that $2,000,000 is pocket change to the government. A single town could give out that much money, never mind an entire state.

My school district (not a rich town nor a poor one) just invested $40,000,000 on a new gymnasium for my school. On top of that a few more million for new classrooms, and busts out a few k for the schools robotics team every year.

My town has a population of 23,852, the entire state of Michigan has a population of 9,938,444. On top of the fact that where my town is situated (Long Island) has some of the highest taxes in the country because of its location.

The fact that giving out this money is even an issue in any government, especially a state government, really makes me scared of what greed can do to people.

There should be absolutely no problem with giving this money to education, but it's all about getting re-elected and keeping yourself in office.

The reason you have so much revenue is *because* your taxes are so high. Actually, some of the highest. According to this ('04 report) http://www2.census.gov/govs/state/04rank.pdf , New York has the 4th highest per capita taxes.

New York taxes aside, according to the pdf, Michigan (rounding to account for inflation), has approximately 60-65 billion dollars to spend. Considering 65 billion, thats .003% of the overall budget! Considering that perhaps 30% of all revenue (22 billion)is spent on education, that's almost .01 percent of the education budget! For the people trying to balance the education budget, a cool two million is an enticing place to save other programs.

I also have no doubt that Michigan is afraid to commit to such a large grant. This grant allows the teams money to start up for one year only. Think of all the people (understandably) trying to come back next year and ask again for the same amount or more! Education will not easily give up 2 million of its budget.

Again, the best bet for Michigan is to reduce that grant significantly. 250,000 will give about fourty teams the chance to start up and test the waters. It would even serve as a nice testbed to see if those teams could rope in enough sponsors to continue for the next year. Baby steps are what FIRST needs, not empty promises.

EDIT NOTE: Boy, I messed up! Those revenues are in billions, not millions, making my figures off by a factor of 1000. They should all be fixed now, though I still take the same stand. Michigan, and the teams recieving the grant money, would in the long run be better served by a smaller amount, gradually introducing teams into FIRST. FIRST might not be recieved well when every business in Michigan near a high school becomes swamped with sponsorship requests in one year. I'm sure the 1/4 million can be quite easily secured.