The Journal masks a tax cut for the rich as concern for ruinous schools. That is what Allysia Finley’s August 9, 2026, opinion column, “Los Angeles Schools Run Out of Other People’s Money,” does. It is not an analysis of a budget problem. It is a defense of a revenue arrangement wearing the costume of a school-board meeting.
I used to walk through pieces like this before I stopped building them — the way you read a weld when you have laid welds yourself. Finley’s column is clean, citation-heavy and structurally dishonest. It points at the spending side, buries the revenue structure and lets the reader complete the accusation. This column walks through the operation as it appears.
Public school districts across America—and the unions that control them—are learning Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about the problem with socialism. They’re running out of other people’s money. Covid dollars from Washington turbocharged hiring at public schools and papered over their structural budget problems. But now that the federal money is drying up, the red ink is starting to gush. According to the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report on Friday, local government education shed 49,600 jobs in July—the leading contributor to the nation’s 23,000 employment decline.
— paragraphs 1–2
Frame-engineered relabeling operates in the first sentence, before a number appears. “Other people’s money” presumes that public-school funding is the private property of the wealthy, being stolen, rather than a public commitment those families’ taxes are lawfully paying to educate children. Get the reader to accept “other people’s money” and you have already won the argument. The jobs statistic that follows is the receipt.
Concede the true half: the number is real. Education employment did fall by 49,600 in July, and the piece cites the Labor Department correctly. That is the craft of it — load a true number into a false frame, so the reader who checks the statistic feels the whole argument has checked out.
But California’s state-and-local per-pupil funding runs below the national average, and measured as effort — what a state tries to fund relative to what it can afford — the state sits at or near the bottom of the fifty. “Other people’s money” was never raining down generously. It was a thin trickle, and the piece’s own politics made it thinner.
In the trade this is called loading the dock: frame out front, facts arriving already dressed. The opening names the unions first. Not the legislatures that set the funding formulas. Not the tax policy that determines how much revenue arrives. The unions.
The scam is already in place.
Ground zero is the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second largest. Its overseers at the Los Angeles County Office of Education last month warned that the district meets the criteria for a “Lack of Going Concern” designation. In the business world, the terminology means a company is at risk of going bankrupt. In June the district ratified agreements with its unions despite repeated warnings by county officials that the contracts are unaffordable. The union agreements are projected to cost $1.13 billion this year and another $1.44 billion next year—money the district knew it didn’t have when it agreed to the deals.
— paragraphs 3–5
This is the honest ground, and I will not pretend otherwise. The county letter is real. The numbers are real. A district that signs contracts after being warned it cannot pay them has committed a genuine governance failure. Say it plainly. My standing to critique the rest of this piece depends on conceding the part that is defensible.
Now watch the scaffold around the truth.
Scare-quote management puts “Lack of Going Concern” in skeptical marks, performing a folksy confidence about bureaucratic terminology while leaning on that same terminology as the piece’s hardest evidence. And the actor has been chosen before the details arrive: “the unions that control them” have already been installed as the culprit.
The county’s warning, the district’s recklessness, the workers who will carry the layoffs — all of it is arranged so the reader lands on the premise the piece needs: the unions did this. The cui-bono question is deferred. Keep it in your pocket; it comes back at the end.
“Unaffordable” is the tell. It smuggles in the premise that the money exists somewhere and was simply misallocated. It does not. A revenue structure was built to be insufficient, and the people defending that structure are now calling the spending reckless. The contracts are unaffordable because the tax settlement that funds California schools was designed to starve them.
The same movement that froze the revenue is pointing at the bill.
Nonetheless, the district agreed to boost pay for principals and assistant principals by 12% over two years, increase average teacher pay by 14% over two years, and raise compensation for non-instructional employees such as custodians, campus aides and cafeteria workers by 24% over three years, in addition to sweetening health benefits. To pay for this, the district sought to raid its retiree health benefits fund. That’s like tapping your 401(k) at age 64 for a holiday you can’t afford.
— paragraph 6
The common-sense pivot and the austerity-thrift archetype run together here. The 401(k) analogy is engineered to make every reader with savings feel the recklessness personally, whether or not a retiree health-benefits fund behaves remotely like a household retirement account. Person-to-person, household-scale, unverifiable. That is its power and its dishonesty.
Read the numbers the way a machinist reads a spec sheet. Twenty-four percent for custodians, campus aides and cafeteria workers over three years. In Los Angeles. Set against principals at 12 percent. The piece presents those increases as the same excess. They are not.
In the trade we called this flattening the moral field so the reader’s outrage does not have to discriminate. The people serving lunch and mopping floors in one of the country’s most expensive metropolitan areas receive a raise that still leaves them near poverty wages, and the piece scripts you to feel clean about cutting it.
That is the austerity-thrift function: it converts what is happening to other people into a lesson they deserved. Suffering becomes discipline. A wage becomes a raid. The reader gets to support cruelty without having to feel cruel.
This is not a household budget. It is a public institution funded by a tax structure that was deliberately broken. The 401(k) analogy is the little costume the piece puts on a fiscal decision so you will not inspect the body underneath.
A recent study by the Reason Foundation found that LAUSD’s inflation-adjusted spending on employee compensation grew by about 27% between 2013 and 2023 even as student enrollment shrank by 35%. Noninstructional staff like counselors, social workers, school nurses and administrators accounted for nearly all of the spending growth.
— paragraph 8
The “study shows” ledger provides the empirical spine. The Reason Foundation is a libertarian public-policy organization with a documented institutional disposition against public-sector labor and pensions. That does not automatically disqualify its study; a sound study from a biased house can still be sound. But Finley cites it as “a recent study,” without naming the house’s disposition, and the reader is meant to take the institution’s selection as neutral fact.
Here is the sentence that gives the operation away: “Counselors, social workers, school nurses.”
The piece lists the very staff who exist because children are in crisis. Poverty, trauma, mental-health fallout and the consequences of the school shutdowns — these children are why social workers were hired. Finley files them under “spending growth” and lets the category carry the accusation.
“Non-instructional” is another frame-engineered relabeling. A counselor is non-instructional. A school nurse is overhead. The reader is taught to see support staff as bloat without the piece having to argue that children do not need counselors or nurses.
Neither the author nor I has opened this district’s books. We are both arguing from the categorical claim, and the categorical claim is where the suppression lives. The growth may represent partial repair after a decade of starvation in a state whose per-pupil funding remains below the national average. When the bare study erases the baseline, the baseline is the suppressed variable.
This is not analysis. It is the paperwork of a layoff list with a bibliography attached.
The district’s spending has so far been financed by rising incomes of top earners and Washington pandemic largess. A buoyant stock market has supercharged capital gains and stock options for the state’s tech workers, while the AI boom has prompted a bidding war for engineers. The average annual pay for an information worker in Silicon Valley’s San Mateo County exceeds $730,000, according to government data. Most revenue from what was supposed to be a temporary income-tax hike on high earners in 2012—which raised the top rate to 13.3% from 10.3%—goes to schools. Average per pupil spending in the state has more than doubled since the 2012 tax hike. State K-12 spending last year increased by a whopping 22%.
— paragraphs 9–10
Frame-engineered relabeling again, with the tell sitting in the words. The top rate is “a temporary income-tax hike,” fourteen years after it became part of the state’s core revenue system. The $730,000 salary appears as an envy-loading detail. The wealthy reader gets sympathy. The children’s schools become “other people’s money.” The “whopping 22%” turns public investment into evidence of recklessness.
Multiple-audience targeting is fully operational inside these sentences. The wealthy reader gets confirmation that the tax was a raid. The political class gets a policy frame it can repeat. The populist base gets the rich-are-being-plundered grievance. The technocrat gets figures that can be carried into a serious-looking argument. One paragraph. Four messages. None of them compatible with the others.
What is never stated is the structural fact that makes the entire piece a misdirection: why are California schools dependent on income-tax and capital-gains revenue in the first place?
Proposition 13, adopted in 1978, caps property taxes at one percent of assessed value and caps annual assessment growth at two percent, regardless of market appreciation. Before Proposition 13, property taxes were a stable and reliable revenue base for California schools. After Proposition 13, that base was gutted. Districts became dependent on income-tax and capital-gains revenue that booms and collapses with the stock market.
The “structural budget problems” Finley diagnoses in paragraph two are not a union invention. They are the revenue volatility that low-property-tax ideology guarantees. The Journal’s tax theology built a school system dependent on windfalls and then arrived to denounce the windfalls as unstable.
The $730,000 tech worker and the lunch worker live in the same fiscal system. Finley has simply chosen which of them is a person and which is a “raid.” The wealthy are not losing. The schools are.
School districts in California receive state funds based on their daily attendance numbers. LAUSD’s enrollment has fallen by nearly half over the past two decades as families have fled its lousy schools and the region’s high cost of living and dirty streets. Covid lockdowns and school closings accelerated the flight, with enrollment dropping by a quarter since 2019. The district has sought to squeeze more money from the state and feds by billing Medicaid for health-related spending like school psychologists and nurses. It has also joined more than 1,000 school districts across the country in suing social-media platforms for allegedly fueling a youth mental-health crisis in hopes that a legal payout can cover its bills—never mind the harms of Covid shutdowns.
— paragraph 11
The blue-state-failure frame takes a real enrollment decline and turns it into a general indictment of union-controlled public education. California’s funding formula ties revenue to attendance. Declining enrollment therefore produces declining revenue, which produces a deficit, which is then blamed on the unions. That arithmetic is real.
But the flight is not an exogenous shock to the funding model. Proposition 13’s frozen assessment base suppresses housing turnover and constrains supply, inflating precisely the housing costs that push families out of districts. The tax structure that starves the schools is also pricing families out of the neighborhoods where those schools operate.
The enrollment collapse is not a separate cause of the deficit. It is another downstream consequence of the same settlement.
The Medicaid billing and the lawsuits against social-media platforms are presented as desperation — a district “squeezing” money and joining a shakedown. But Medicaid billing is an attempt to recover costs the state and federal government do not cover. The lawsuit is an attempt to hold an alleged source of youth harm financially accountable. When a corporation sues a vendor for damages, the Journal calls it savvy litigation. When a school district does it, the Journal calls it a scam.
That is the double standard. Frame what a corporation does as smart and what a public institution does as desperate. The reader absorbs contempt for public institutions without anyone having to argue for it.
LAUSD and its unions are ultimately betting on California’s wealthy bailing them out. SpaceX’s initial public offering in June, and mooted IPOs by OpenAI and Anthropic, could generate tens of billions more dollars for schools—assuming high-flyers don’t vamoose to avoid a hefty tax bill on their windfalls. By some estimates, a wealth tax on the November ballot to boost spending on Medicaid has already caused $1 trillion to leave the state. And what will schools and their unions do if the AI-driven stock-market boom runs out of steam and the fortunes of the wealthy that finance their golden rice bowls plunge? Expect layoffs galore. It’s no wonder young socialists think they can raid the rich to pay for their bills when the adults in charge of educating behave under the same presumption. Both have an education coming.
— paragraphs 12–14
Threat inflation escalates the specific deficit into civilizational stakes. The vocabulary tells you who the piece has stopped speaking for: “high-flyers” who might “vamoose,” “golden rice bowls,” “young socialists.” The column no longer performs concern for schoolchildren. It is speaking to the wealthy as one of them, warning them to leave before the state raids them again.
“Golden rice bowls” is the dehumanizing euphemism for workers’ benefits. It turns public employees into vessels being filled while the people who will actually absorb “layoffs galore” — teachers, custodians, nurses and aides — disappear behind a joke.
And then there is “by some estimates.” That is the weasel qualifier’s pin, the pearly gatekeeper letting through a contested, self-interested claim because it serves the frame. The piece demands the Labor Department’s exact figure in the lede and gives its most important scare number the loosest sourcing. The $1 trillion is an estimate of wealth that would leave with people who might pay the tax. “Some” does not make the claim careful. It makes the claim decorative.
The closing is also a strawman. Nobody in the piece proposes “raiding the rich.” “Young socialists” is a phantom summoned so the final maxim has something to execute. The “adults in charge of educating” are lumped together with those young socialists, while the teachers, custodians and nurses are the ones the piece has been grooming the reader to feel clean about cutting.
This is the austerity-thrift archetype completing itself, joined to the threat-inflation closer and trimmed for retransmission. “Both have an education coming” is designed to be quoted, shared and savored. It makes the destruction of school funding sound like a schoolroom correction — a scolding, not a layoff notice.
Make cruelty sound like discipline, and the reader does not have to feel like the person it serves.
It is a property-defense memorandum with a school bell drawn on the cover.
The forced label is this: Finley’s column is not an article about budgets. It is a tax-cut leaflet that needed children in the frame to be respectable. The “other people” in the title were never the ones sitting in the classrooms. The title grieves for people earning $730,000 a year. The people whose schools are failing — the children, the lunch workers, the nurses and the teachers — are the ones the memo proposes to cut, and it offers you the pleasure of calling that justice.
Hold the mirror up.
The face it holds to the reader is the person who read “other people’s money” and never once asked whose money, or who the other people are. The person who sits at a table with paid-for food and calls a cafeteria worker’s 24 percent raise “a raid.” That is who the piece is written for, and the piece tells you so in the contempt it lavishes on everyone else.
Follow the benefit up and the cost down. The concentrated beneficiary is the wealthy, protected from the public claim on their gains. The diffuse cost-bearers are the children and workers absorbing the layoffs the piece savors. Cui bono asks the question; the evidence answers it.
The Journal has spent five decades building the tax structure that produces this crisis. Proposition 13 caps property taxes at one percent and assessment growth at two percent, regardless of market value. The result was predictable: school funding was severed from property wealth, and districts became dependent on income-tax and capital-gains revenue that rises when Silicon Valley rises and collapses when it does not.
Finley mentions the 2012 tax hike and the increase in per-pupil spending as proof that schools already have too much money. What she does not mention is that Proposition 13 is why schools needed a tax hike in the first place. The temporary increase was a patch on a wound the Journal’s tax theology inflicted decades earlier.
The piece blames the spending side while the revenue side does the damage.
That is not analysis. That is the shell game.
The Journal wants you to believe public education’s problem is that it is public — that socialism is the disease and privatization is the cure. But the people who benefit from California’s tax structure — property owners, the capital-gains class and the readers who subscribe to this page — have spent five decades making sure schools do not have the revenue to function, then pointing at the dysfunction as proof that government does not work.
The diagnosis is the product.
The crisis is the pitch.
“Both have an education coming,” Finley writes. In one sense she is right. But only one of us is being paid, by the page that ran it, to give it.
— Phukher Tarlson