State Senate Republicans are blaming Democrats for rising tuition at our state colleges and universities. Of course they are. And they’re right. Democrats are to blame. But more so the Republicans.
For while Republicans didn’t officially seize control of the Senate until Rodney Tom and Tom Sheldon betrayed their constituents in 2013, thanks to the disloyalty of “roadkill” Dems, Republicans more or less controlled the Senate budget-writing process for some time. In fact, back in 2011, former Republican Senator Joe Zarelli personally boasted to me that he wrote the Senate budget, not then Democratic Ways & Means chair Ed Murray.
But whatever. I’m less interested in apportioning the blame than I am in fixing the problem. And this sort of bullshit doesn’t help:
Bailey fingers a “lack of commitment by elected leaders” but also a lack of accountability on the part of universities as the causes of ballooning tuition that has “functioned like a tax on our middle-class families.”
“For years higher education funding has been used as a piggy bank to offset funding reductions in other areas of the budget,” she wrote. “As we work through the budget process and policy proposals, it is important to hold the line on higher education funding. We also expect higher education institutions to hold the line on tuition increases.”
Oy. How many times do I have to go through this? It’s not the cost of a college education that’s skyrocketing, it’s the price:
It’s not the cost of college education that’s skyrocketing. It’s the price.
As you can see from the chart above, adjusted for inflation, the cost of educating a student has remained relatively flat over the past two decades. Tuition has been rising not in response to rising costs, but as a direct response to cuts in state funding.
No doubt there’s room for universities to try to be more accountable and efficient, but it’s not accountability that’s been the problem. It’s a lack of funding. And the only way for universities to hold the line on tuition increases is for legislators to hold the line on funding. (Or, I suppose, we could just offer a cheaper, lower quality college education. Is that what Senator Bailey is arguing for? I don’t think so.)
Yes, state lawmakers have used higher education as a piggy bank of sorts. But that’s not because Democrats hate higher education. It’s because there’s so little truly discretionary spending available to cut in the state budget. And Republicans have made it impossible to raise taxes.
That’s the problem. Collectively, our taxes are too low to sustain the government we want and need. In fact, as a percentage of income, our state and local taxes are now 20 percent lower than they were 20 years ago. If Republicans want to argue that we should be spending more money on higher ed, then they need to tell us which taxes they want to raise or which social service programs they want to cut. Because that’s the only other place to find the money.
So good on Senator Bailey for recognizing that tuition hikes function like a tax on middle-class families. We all agree. Now if only she and her fellow Republicans would permit a conversation replacing this virtual tax with a real tax on the wealthy households who can afford it.
I every time spent my half an hour to read this weblog’s posts daily along with a cup of coffee.|
Of course we need tax reform. WA state is the worst state in the Union in terms of the fairness of our system and our education record show this.
However we ALSO need to understand what we are trying to do. No amount of funding can support a limitless expansion of higher ed ..covering everything from cosmetology to theoretical cosmology .
Rather, we need to link a better tax system to a reform of the system building on what we already have .. one world class university, several world class colleges, a world class community colleges system, a dismal secondary school system and a dismal lack of private schools able to compete with out best public schools.
Taxes are too high for the people who pay them (i.e., low-income households), which is why we’ve hit a wall in trying to raise existing taxes — the poor and those of modest incomes are tapped out.
Taxes are too low only for people who aren’t paying them (i.e., affluent households). Unfortunately, the overtaxed of this state seem willing to defend the undertaxed’s free ride at the ballot box, so I’m at a loss as to where we go from here.
The state budget consists of lots of little pieces and a handful of big ones. One of the big ones — transportation — is funded by dedicated taxes that can’t be spent for anything else. The same is true of property tax revenues earmarked for K-12 education. (In most states, this funding isn’t part of the state budget at all. In Washington, the Superintendent of Public Instruction is just a conduit for the roughly 42% of the state budget that is passed from state tax collectors to local school districts.) That leaves DSHS and the Department of Corrections.
Do you want to release violent criminals to our streets? That’s one of Olympia’s few options if Washington voters refuse to pay taxes. (But legislators can’t say that or they’ll be accused of “scare tactics.”)
The other one is cutting Medicaid spending. Here, you have to cut $2 to get $1 of state savings, because the federal government matches this spending 50-50, and you give up that federal money if you don’t spend any state money. Medicaid buys health care for two main groups: Poor people (mostly single mothers and children), and indigent elderly people in nursing homes. The latter are people who need professional nursing care and have nowhere else to go.
Much of the rest of state government consists of little agencies, many of them funded by fees or dedicated taxes, for example the Gambling Commission is funded by fees paid by the legal gambling industry. Even many DSHS programs use little or no state money; for example, the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, which is housed within DSHS, manages a program mandated by federal law (it’s not optional) and is 100% federally funded. The child support enforcement program, also under DSHS’s organizational umbrella, is also federally mandated, and is 85% federally funded. You can’t save money in the state budget by cutting or eliminating these federally funded mandates, even if you’re willing to defy the federal laws requiring states to have them, because that’s not state money being spent there.
The reality is that to make up for Washington’s ever-weakening state revenues, legislators have only three places they can make large enough cuts to close billion-dollar budget gaps: Medicaid, education, and prisons. That’s it. Everything else is either federal money or pocket change. So, if Washington voters don’t want to pay taxes, they’ll have to decide which of these things they’re willing to give up. They may eventually have to do without major parts of all three.
So weird – this highly deceptive chart would lead you to believe that our state and local tax revenues per capita are not only completely in line with the rest of the country, but also actually trending higher over time even adjusted for inflation.
http://www.ofm.wa.gov/trends/revenue/fig504.asp
Bunch of goddamn Republicans probably used some Koch Brothers version of Excel to make it.
Well, at least WA had the good sense to legalize recreational use of marijuana. The will be some revenues coming in from that.
Absolutely NOT since shortly after the of the Bush Depression.
And if it was any higher before that I’d chalk it up to the Florida effect – a steady influx of newcomers (thank you Boeing and Microsoft) will hide almost any lousy tax policy.
See Kansas, home of the Koch Brothers, for a counter-example..
@7: WTF are you talking about? “Newcomers” add to the denominator, the taxes they pay add to the numerator – the chart shows per capita taxes collected.
And not that it matters, but as Goldy will tell you, Boeing is doing its damnedest to move jobs out of WA. Microsoft is shrinking jobs, period.
Would have been nice if Ed Murray had been asked about this.
8 – Where’s your sense of time? So you concede my point about the Bush depression.. Lower per capita taxes collected with a still growing population needing services. Utterly sustainable in your book I’m sure..
BEFORE the Bush Depression, ever hear of the B&O tax? Lots of new businesses opening here to employ and serve the newcomers. All have to pay taxes on GROSS receipts – there’s your numerator.
And yes AFTER the Bush Depression, Boeing and Microsoft are clawing back in search of ever greater profits. Who’d a thunk that?
@10: I concede that you may not have a grasp of what “per capita” means, yes.
And again, if you look at that chart, you’ll see that Washington mirrors the national averages, whether in bubbles or recessions, and is back to climbing on a per capita basis – people are feeling their taxes go up again, relentlessly, when you add up all the sources of taxation.
For more recent data, you can look at indicators to see if somehow the trend has changed since 2011. One way is to just Google some official stats and see that WA state (not counting local) tax collections climbed 5.4% from 2012-2013, over $800M (http://dor.wa.gov/Docs/Reports.....able01.pdf). While not a perfectly aligned time period, state population in the similar timeframe increased .95% (http://www.ofm.wa.gov/pop/april1/poptrends.pdf). So the trend is holding – per capita, tax revenue is climbing.
This is not to address the regressive nature of WA taxes, or whether there’s a better way to do it. This is purely addressing the lie about somehow revenues not keeping up with population growth – it’s bullshit.
@8 Newcomers add nothing to the state’s general revenues unless they buy cars and other goods from local merchants, which is not a given. That’s the consequence of a system that relies on sales taxes and doesn’t tax incomes.
@11 “people are feeling their taxes go up again, relentlessly, when you add up all the sources of taxation”
Correction, SOME people, i.e. those least able to pay, are feeling THEIR taxes go up. That’s because Washington loads the tax burden on the bottom of the income scale. That burden is spread very unevenly across society and certainly isn’t felt at the top because those folks get a free ride. Raising taxes on the poor but not on the affluent, while starving the state of the revenues needed for public services, is what this whole argument is all about.
“May not”? Why hedge? You don’t sound too confident. Not a promising beginning for anti-Hanauer troll.
Thank heavens we’re not in Kansas Dorothy!
Heh. Oh wouldn’t it be great to feel taxes going DOWN like 2008/2009?? Yeah to see your property taxes drop with the added bonus of cheaper gas only look around and everyone’s losing their jobs.
Ok fast forward and look at Kansas and there’s that same feeling huh? Only look around and class sizes are growing by leaps and bounds and the classrooms are filthy because the school districts can only afford to clean them every third day. Now everyone’s picking up a pitchfork and chasing after the idiot Governor.
Klownservative utopia!
Oh wow.. The economy recovers modestly. Boeing finally pushes a new plane out the door after failing disastrously to do it on the cheap. Unemployment drops from the high 9’s to 6. Consumers spend out that pent up demand. Real Estate comes back and the property tax algos claw back some of what was previously lost.
Still per capita taxes are BELOW national average according to the graph you linked.
Aaaaah! Don’t TABOR me Bro!
It’s gonna be fun around here with a new generation of trolls trying to knock down a plutocrat with a clue.
Like Florida.. A healthy net influx of newcomers swelling the property tax, car tab and sales tax receipts tells klownservative politicians that everything’s just fine. No need to futz with the status quo.
Maybe what our newest troll wants is the Ferguson, MO model.
Just make sure the poor folk obey the law. Set out those speed traps, check those car tabs, tail lights, FINE heavily..
If they get too uppity, time to trot out that fancy military gear, the free stuff the feds don’t need no more.
That’ll keep taxes low for the “producers”.
16
Yeah, that military gear and police forces is very worrisome. The Feds should stop giving cops surplus military weapons and hardware.
@18 The feds should do more than that. They should repossess the gear they’ve already handed out.
Do we really want the Pentagon to give armored personnel carriers and machine guns to cops who kick pregnant women in the belly?
http://content.usatoday.com/co.....CXRR400XQc
Good to see Roger NoBalls IDIOT Wabbit@18 agreeing with Puddy on the excess military gear going to police agencies. PuddyReported this long ago from conservative sites. Just ask the clueless monomaniacal moronic crazed cretin for a crazed databaze review!
farqwad,
Arguing FACTS with the clueless monomaniacal moronic crazed cretin is a real lesson in futility! Nice chart digs!
Even Roger NoBalls IDIOT Wabbit took the clueless monomaniacal moronic crazed cretin@7 to task
and it didn’t even register with the brainless couching sitting hack!
Wow!
I see what your sayin’ and I hear it, too!
@13: Re: “starving” – revenue is going up on both a gross and per capita inflation-adjusted basis, per the earlier links (sourced from the state, not me). It is highly likely given the state economy and the state/national trendlines that the updated numbers will show WA revenues crossing back above the national average. Per the data in this doc (http://www.ofm.wa.gov/reports/.....report.pdf), as of 2009 (which appears to be the latest data available), the top 20% of the income earners in the state are paying around 38% of the overall state (not local) tax, and that is on a gross basis before you consider any of the net income effects of federal taxes, and then transfers back to the lower deciles at the local, county, state and federal level in the form of assistance and services.
So given that, what’s “fair?” Honest question.
Second question: How do you adjust your approach to get the large majority of state voters (who don’t trust politicians on this topic) to believe in and support a more progressive tax system?
@16: I’d not only take away those cops’ toys, I’d empty the jails and prisons of non-violent offenders so fast your head would spin. Dig into civil asset forfeiture sometime if you haven’t – it’s another way of preying on the poor.
@23 Do you even read the stuff you link to? This is only 2 pages in:
“All three measures of state and local taxes have decreased sometime during the great recession: per $1,000 of personal income (continuing a long-term downward trend), on a per capita basis (since 2007) and as a percent of GDP (in 2009).”
and …
“The 2009 level of state taxes at $58.82 per $1,000 in personal income is the lowest level during the time period, 1960 – 2009.” (p. 49)