Why would taxpayers send money to the federal government that was ultimately intended to come back to their state or local governments?

That’s a recipe for losing a big chunk of our education dollars to those sticky-fingered federal fellows. And any money the feds send back, always comes saddled with a lot of silly mandates about how we locals can spend what is, after all, our own money.

In 2006, taxpayers were forced to fund the U.S. Department of Education to the tune of $57 billion. Of this, $44 billion slushed back to states and localities. But even the money returned by the federal government is often misspent. By mandate.

In a column for the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney explains how one such mandate empowers pork-barrel politics, not education. Senators Jeff Bingaman, Patty Murray and Richard Burr have introduced legislation entitled the Achievement Through Technology and Innovation Act. The bill would require local schools to spend this federal grant money on computers, software and related training.

Carney points out there is much doubt about the effectiveness of educational software. He suggests that this legislation won’t help educate kids, but it “will certainly brighten the prospects of America’s software makers.”

Long ago Ronald Reagan advocated abolishing the federal Department of Education because, for all the money it spends, it doesn’t educate one single child. Our young people are educated at the local level.

Let’s keep all our education tax dollars at the local level. And the feds can keep their mandates.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

There’s the real world, and there are representations of it.

I draw a picture of, say, a gun. That picture is of a gun; it is not itself an actual gun. It’s just a, well, doodle.

This being the case — that doodles differ from real threats — then why was a 13-year-old boy near Mesa, Arizona, suspended from school?

He drew a gun . . . on a piece of paper. He didn’t point it at anybody. He made no hit list, he didn’t say “Bang.” No one even got a paper cut.

But school officials treated it as a threat, lectured his poor father on the shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, and suspended the lad.

The district spokesman insisted that the doodle was “absolutely considered a threat.”

But somehow, knowing that this student was suspended, I’m not feeling any safer.

If our teachers and administrators can’t distinguish real threats from doodles— doodles most boys do, doodles I drew when I was a boy â— then what are they teaching the kids? To overreact to everything? To not be able to distinguish small problems from big ones? To treat every symbol or representation as the real thing?

It’s elementary: the map is not the territory, the representation is not the thing represented.

You’d think, then, that teachers would be trying to impart (not erase) that notion from the minds of students.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Why do they do it? These people who battle for sanity in the schools, who take on city hall, who recruit people to run for office, who challenge laws in court, who launch voter initiatives for reform.

People like 95-year old Dorothy English. She’s battled for decades against local land-use regulators in Oregon for the simple right to give some of her land to her children. People like Dianna Pharr, a Texas mother taking on an unethical school district. Folks like Bryan Ault, who launched the recent online petition against Virginia’s new, draconian mega-taxes slapped on certain traffic offenses.

These citizens who stand up risk attack and reprisal from the powerful and the well-connected. They incur bills. They work doing politics on some weekends when they could be playing golf. They sometimes make financial contributions they later have to explain to sometimes skeptical spouses.

I work full time in politics and public policy. It doesn’t leave me a lot of extra time. Yet, the local leaders I know never cease to amaze me with how much they accomplish in addition to their real jobs.

Why do they do it? They believe in right and wrong. And they know that if they don’t stand up for what’s right, even when it’s inconvenient, that right will not prevail. Most importantly, our right as citizens to control our government. Rather than the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Big Apple cabbies are on strike.

Against whom? The companies leasing the cabs and licenses?

Nope, it’s the New York City government, seeking to impose onerous GPS and credit-card machine requirements. The cabbies fear they’ll end up paying the cost individually.

Of course, as in other towns, New York’s cab market is oppressively controlled. Licenses are expensive. Cabbies are often ordered about. They may not even refuse fares to neighborhoods they deem life-threatening. One New Yorker, commenting online, says all this bureaucratic breathing down the neck of the cabbie community is fine with him. He claims: “It’s a tremendous privilege to use NYC streets to ply your trade. We have the right to regulate you.” Yikes.

This notion, taken to its logical conclusion, would destroy the rights of anybody who regularly uses public spaces — in short, everybody. So, no, the extent to which government is already running our lives and roads does not justify forfeiting whatever freedom of action remains. The liberty to peacefully make a living is a right, not a privilege to be revoked at will.

So I’m with the cabbies on their stike. It’s a cause well worth a long work or two.

And I’ve liked it when customers have protested arbitrary caps on the supply of taxicabs. But instead of tweaking decades of coercive controls that hurt everybody, let’s throw out all these burdensome regulations, and try some free enterprise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Is there any way to word it?

I’m thinking of a constitutional amendment, something citizens in initiative states could vote for that would curtail an absolutely insane practice.

I refer to unfunded pension and health care benefits.

I came across this practice most recently in Washington state. An analysis by Amber Gunn of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation shows the state’s public employee health benefits plan is accumulating huge debts.

“Over the next 25 years,” she writes, “the cost of health benefits for public retirees . . . could reach more than $12 billion.”

How? The state doesn’t pay for its workers’ and pensioners’ health care benefits by investing in an insurance policy. Instead, the state simply pays the medical bills as they accumulate.

Now, there are a lot of people who want to turn the whole U.S. health care system into something similar. But it has a drawback. Costs can skyrocket, and you haven’t planned in any way to minimize those costs. Taxpayers just keep paying and paying.

No sane business person would concoct such a scheme. But politicians kinda like this method. They can promise anything, and it won’t appear on any balance sheet until the promises come due.

Someone else’s problem. A future legislator, perhaps.

Citizens in Washington and elsewhere need a carefully-worded rule to prohibit politicians from promising any future benefit without funding that benefit within the year of the promise. Just to prevent utter irresponsibility. And state bankruptcy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.