Taxes, New Hampshire, and New York
Two weeks ago, I talked about the difficulties Vermont has been having with its system of funding education. Although the Green Mountain State is no stranger to broad-based taxes, a group of cities and towns still alleged the system was unfair, and required greater reliance on the sales or income tax.
Now, let's take a look at another state with an income and a sales tax, New York. Do they have an equitable system of funding education? Are their property tax bills low? It seems not:
Everybody has a plan because everybody has a complaint. Eat a burger at a barbecue and someone asks if your taxes have gone up and is there any end in sight...In New York, that heavy reliance on property taxes is about $19 billion, or 43 percent of what we spend on schools. But the education department reports that "a student's access to educational resources depends in large part on where he or she lives, raising serious concerns about the equity of student opportunities."I think the emotion this New Hampshire resident is feeling right now is called Schadenfreude. But am I wrong to feel it? I don't think so.
posted by Joshua @ 3:44 PM
2 Comments:
Schadenfreude, for anyone who both didn't know its meaning, and didn't bother to check the link, means "Shameful joy."
I live in New York City, which provides just about the entirety of the tax money that the rest of the state runs on, but not the local taxes. Because of this, NYC schools have barely enough money to provide buildings in which to hold their student, and no money to provide the rest of the essentials. They're prisons for children. They're horrible. And it's been going on for so long that anybody with even a little bit of money sends their kids to any private school that they can afford, and the churches put up any money that they can spend for the children of their congregations to attend their parochial schools, and even that got so bad that the Catholic diocese had to close down half their schools a couple years ago.
The schools are awful, and because they've been so bad for so long, they've only gotten worse, and the rich population of the city has no interest in seeing them improve. It's so bad that when Cynthia Nixon sent her child to public school as a sign of solidarity, it made front-page headlines. Children go to school in prisons, learn nothing, almost none of them go to college, because they haven't been trained well enough to get in, and have never been taught that it's a worthwhile option, they drop out in astonishing numbers, and they join gangs because that's they only way for them to earn any money or respect.
So, two things. One, taxes aren't everything. You also need a populace that cares enough about public education to actually change it for the better. The education budget should be mandated as only coming from state funds, if not federal funds. As long as children refuse to choose who they are born to, we can't with good conscience keep up a system wherein their educational quality is based on their neighborhood.
Secondly, I know that you know all of this, so where does the "joy" come from in the "shame"?
The "joy" comes from the "I told you so" factor.
You see, those in New Hampshire who favor broad-based taxes love to tell us that, once we switch from the villainous property tax to the virtuous income tax, every inequality ever will be solved!
We in New Hampshire who are against broad-based taxes think differently. We say that, if you add more taxes, all you're really doing is creating more revenue for the Legislature to divy up. And that means more opportunities for corruption. In the end, problems aren't really solved. As a matter of fact, they may be made worse. So, I'm chuckling that yet another state has taxed themselves into economic stagnation and corruption. I know I shouldn't, thus schadenfreude.
Now, as for your specific point:
"Because of this, NYC schools have barely enough money to provide buildings in which to hold their student, and no money to provide the rest of the essentials."
I was curious about this, so I looked up the NYC Department of Education budget (you can too - it's right here).
The most recent figures available, which appear to be the '03-'04 school year, show a total budget of $14.6 BILLION. When narrowed down to what the department terms 'direct services,' the figure was $12.1 billion. The per student amount was $11,172.
In addition, take a gander at this related link. It shows that New York state has incredibly high per pupil spending, and about half of that comes from state sources. Both city and state are spending a great deal of money on education, it turns out. It also turns out that broad-based funding accounts for a great deal of it. They're just not spending it correctly. Which is exactly my point.
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