I had a long argument with someone over this once. He didn’t have children, so why should he pay for schools? He said he was tired of paying taxes from his retail business to support schools when it didn’t benefit him.
I asked him where he got his workers. How did they learn to add and subtract so they would give correct change? How did they learn grammar so that business materials were done professionally?
Stunned silence.
Look, we don’t all have to be particle physicists, but we ALL benefit from a good education system.
I hope the surrounding towns charged them for the aid.
We had a similar problem here. One local city (~10,000 pop), that happened to be VERY wealthy (and full of tea partiers), protested against the cost of the fire department. It got so nasty that the FD was actually disbanded entirely. The city then contracted out fire and emergency services with a neighboring village of similar size but average incomes less than 25% as high as the first.
Insurance rates in the first town SOARED. Response times dropped (the neighboring town wasn’t about to risk service that their residents paid for). They charged the first town a small fortune for each response, and they were the LOW bidders.
Needless to say, the first town eventually decided to pay for their own department again.
Sometimes you don’t understand the value until its gone. My neighbors certainly understood it once they saw our FD standing out for 8 hours one night unclogging storm drains in a heavy rain with 33 degree temps, all to save our basements from flooding (who would have thought that would have been a risk, living on top of a hill 200 feet above the nearest creek)
Every State in the Union except Hawaii funds schools via property taxes. What part of the property tax funding for schools do you object to?
The probelm faced in getting support for reducing the pain felt by workers that get high compensation (be they union,non-union,private,public) is that there are so many of us that do not get well compensated, do not have kids in the public school system and do not link how children are schooled with how I pay my monthly bills,is that we actually feel good that you are now feeling the pain I have felt all my life. Combine that “welcome to my world” mentality with the fact that my vote is just as good as your vote and there are more of me than you,makes a problem for you. I do not care at all that you are now facing the same issues I am.
It almost seems that everyone thinks that “the other guy” is too well compensated. My brother earned a doctorate in English and was teaching for a small state university. The president of this university in a faculty meeting told the faculty to quit complaining about their salaries. He said, “Faculty are a dime a dozen”. My brother wrote out his resignation, took it to the president, gave him a dime and said, “Go buy a dozen”. My brother then started his own technical writing company. He was doing quite well, but had some cases where he thought that knowledge of the law was important. He took a couple of law courses, which turned into a law degeee and he then passed the bar exam. He practiced law about ten years, and then with a friend, decided to purchase a plumbing company. He and his friend really worked hard to build up the business. I was with him once when a customer called. The customer asked his rates and my brother told him his charge for a service call which included up to one hour of labor, and then gave him the hourly rate beyond that. The caller was indignant: “I have an MBA and am a manager in a big company. I don’t get that kind of money”. My brother responded: “I have a Ph.D. and a law degree. I have been a college professor and a successful attorney. I now do plumbing. You have 3 choices: 1) you can hire me at my rates; 2) you can see if you can find someone that works for less; 3) you can do the job yourself. Please make up your mind in 30 seconds because I have another call coming in”.
We grew up in a working class neighborhood where none of us had very much. We all pitched in and helped each other. We all felt each other’s pain. When I think about it, maybe I grew up with having a lot more than money can buy.
Let me in the club and my loyalties will change real quick. My best pre tax year was 2001 and that was right at 46K and then you look at what that will buy it is not hard to decide not to get married and not to have children (I did the married thing a couple of times anyway though, they had money, it is fun spending other peoples money).
What part of the property tax for funding schools does “eraser” have a problem with? Here in AZ there is a lot of questionable state land swaps going on (and funding of the State Land Trust Dept) as state land is to be sold and the proceedes used to pay for the schools. This is clearly spelled out in the State Constitution but still people mess it up (or better said, mess with it).
Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled the funding system unconstitutional because it relied too heavily on property taxes that could NOT BE RAISED without another levy… That was 15 YEARS ago, and they’ve made the problem worse.
Teachers in Ohio, when viewed on an hourly cost for wages and benefits, get less than just about every other profession with equivalent education.
The unconstitutional part… the part where there is NO method for raising additional funds to even keep up with inflation without passing yet another tax levy? The part where the GOP eliminates all business taxes that provided over 1/3 of all funding to some districts without allowing for ANY method of recovering that funding other than massive property tax hikes, which the supreme court ruled unconstitutional…
You take your pick.
Every other state that I know that does rely on property taxes for school funding does so in a manner that revenues for the school can rise automatically at the rate of inflation. Ohio doesn’t.
Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:
South Carolina ? 50th
North Carolina ? 49th
Georgia ? 48th
Texas ? 47th
Virginia ? 44th
Why? Class size, teacher salary, wages you tell me!
Here in Tuscon (and perhaps other parts of the country) the areas with the high value homes have the best public school infrastructure. Some like the fact that they can influence the school that they send their children to through the property tax funding method. Others feel that all schools should recieve equal money for inital building and mainteance. This difference in school quality does make for a culture/class division here in Tuscon. There always have been complaints and promises of restructuring of school funding. Funny thing is that in Hawaii where schools are not funded through property taxes the same type divisions exist. I wrote a paper on how the educational needs of homeless children are being met and the methods to school homeless children differ drasticaly.Hawaii had to be taken into court to force them to adopt policies that do not discrimate against homeless children. I wrote this paper in the class taught by that instructor that felt her race was always being taken advantage of. The instructions were to write a paper on how the public education experience differs for different groups. She thought she had me trapped into writing about racial division but I fooled her and picked homelessness as the factor that defined my group.I love messing with educators heads ,espically ones that are used to bullying young students.
Many teachers hands are tied by local school board policies. Not that some teachers don’t engage in “Bullying”, but often it’s done to steer students to topics and areas they feel more qualified to teach. The solution, hire more qualified teachers. To do that, you’ll have to compete with other disttricts in your state or region and offer better payroll packages. Like “water boy” and “oldschool” imply, “you all get what you pay for.” often true buying cars or the services of Good teachers, cops or factory workers. In our area, The loss of factories and a strong tax base in one part of the state caused an in flux of applications from that area to ours. In three years, lost positions through retirement were filled by, in some cases more qualified educators and our district benefits immensely.
The non budget item declaring unions cannot have dues deducted from employees passed. (p.s. unions typically only support democrats) So unions lose their funding but corporations are now individuals so can contribute, a republican win!
Unions can now only bargain on a cost of living increase.
Child labor laws repeal
Elimination of homestead credit and earned income tax credit, how is that not a tax increase?
All Gov employees now loose income to the tune of 6.5% towards pension and whatever more for health insurance.
Cut funding for badger care, a health care program
Moving up of highway projects, causes outsourcing at greater cost to tax payers due to laid off engineers.
Millionaire and corporate tax breaks.
The goal seems clear, cut off the funding for anyone who supports democrats, balance tax cuts for the rich and corporations by decreasing net income for the poor, people on medical assistance, workers, including school districts, local and county government employees or anyone else that might use a tax dollar.
Union members would still be free to contribute to Democrats, would they not? That would be a net increase in efficiency of funding by cutting out the middleman of the union.
The EITC is essentially a subsidy for those who reproduced without being able to afford it. I would say let’s consider exempting the working poor from FICA but make them pay a small income tax.
@piter - of course by law already in place, union members cannot have dues deducted for political purposes if they choose not to. In other words, if you’re a union member and don’t like the candidates the union supports, you can EASILY have that portion of your dues which goes to political activities added back to your paycheck.
As for the EITC, its expansion was the brain-child of the Republican party, as they viewed it as a way to encourage work rather than sitting on welfare - the idea being that the refunded portion of the EITC (your negative income tax rate) was still significantly less than a welfare payment… so subsidizing wages would effectively reduce welfare costs far more…