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News Blogs
 
Tax cap
By Carl Strock
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Some new thoughts on the proposed tax cap, as it’s called. (This would be a limit on how much school districts could increase their total haul from property taxes from one year to the next.) I dismissed it recently, saying what we really needed was a spending cap. E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center, an offshoot of the Manhattan Institute, wanted to know why I thought the state’s largest teachers’ union, NYSUT, was so adamantly opposed to a tax cap if it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. Good point, I had to admit. I figured that any spending no longer covered by local property taxes would simply be made up out of the state budget, and spending would therefore continue to go up and up. McMahon says no, because the schools (and NYSUT) would then be competing with everyone else at the state trough – with Medicaid, with hospitals, with the other public-employee unions – and the state couldn’t afford to satisfy them all. In some years the schools would have to tighten their belts, which for the teachers’ union, of course, is a horrifying prospect. Makes sense. For a fuller discussion, please see my column in the print edition of today’s Daily Gazette.
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September 7, 2008
9:29 a.m. [ Suggest removal ]
From what I've heard said by a number of local school board members over the years, the breast beating and posturing of our state legislators might be a bit more convincing if they would attack the issue of unfunded state mandates imposed on the local school boards. This becomes evident when a school budget is defeated and a contingency budget must be adopted, which is within a few percent of the defeated budget.
2:20 a.m. [ Suggest removal ]
Eureka! Mr. Strock and Mr. McMahon each get an A+. Educators don't want to have to compete with other government functions for funding any more than they have to. The more they have to compete, the slower the growth in spending.
I've been working on a project, in part, to prove this very point. The Schenectady County Public Library has an important educational role and it is run by master-degreed librarians. Its public function is as close to being a school as you can get without actually being a school. It's a labor-intensive organization, with 70% to 84% of its budget going to employee salaries and benefits over the past 38 years. Importantly, the library is funded by the county tax levy, not by its own levy. The library budget has been 3.73%, or less, of the total county budget for the past 38 years, falling to its lowest level of 1.96% just this year.
So, what happens when a master-degreed, educational service has to compete with other governmental priorities? My 1970-2008 graphic that answers this question is at
http://www.myshortpencil.com/schooltalk/...
While Scotia-Glenville's school spending has significantly increased from a low of $26.6 million to its current $46 million, library spending has remained practically unchanged, ranging from $4.9 million to $5.9 million and currently at $5.5 million. The per capita spending for the library has ranged from $31 to $39 over the 38-year period, while per capita school spending has ranged from $926 to its current high of nearly $1,600, despite serving 40% fewer students than it did in 1970.
The more directly public schools have to compete with others for government funding, the less they get. And that tells you one of the most effective ways to slow the inflation-busting growth of school spending.