Budgets are tight everywhere. Your family or yourself have tightened belts as gas prices continue to climb, grocery prices rise & the overall cost of living increases. While you and yours’ costs have gone up, income has stayed the same or hasn’t kept up with the increases. As a result, you trim a bit here, trim a bit there to make sure the money stretches out.
Government doesn’t work or operate in the same manner you or your family does, especially regarding their budgets – not that they shouldn’t try though. The costs of government are going up just like your costs of living have. The largest difference between government & you is where you have had to cut your household budget to keep up with incoming revenue; government for the most part has not done the same.
But then again, governments can always raise taxes for more revenues whereas you cannot. This is a huge problem…especially at the local level & this does not get enough attention.
School districts have been hit hard by the state of Illinois’ budget problems. Many school districts are facing deficits in their budgets because the state has not paid districts or has cut funding to districts outright. School districts have done some cuts but many of the cuts districts have made are merely surface cuts & have not fixed the problem at large.
However, further cuts that school districts have proposed fall along President Obama’s sequestration mantra of “make them feel the pain”.
School districts must get creative in their budgeting. School boards & the teacher unions toss around scary phrases like “increasing class size” to indicate that they will have to lay off teachers meaning a higher student to teacher ratio. This kind of talk gets parents riled up who then demand their school board to “do something” despite mixed studies about whether increasing class size effects education achievement.
School districts have enormous taxing power & receive money from a multitude of sources from federal grants, state funding, local property taxes, etc. Look at your property tax bill & see what the breakdown of what your property taxes go towards. Much of your property taxes I would bet go to education whether it’s your local school district or whether it’s your local colleges or universities. Think about all the ways you are taxed or provide money for schools. Federal taxes fund federal grants. State income tax. Property tax. Individual school “fees” for athletics, band, etc. Fundraisers and more.
The newest argument gaining momentum for revenues to fund school districts involves increasing a county’s sales tax to help offset the state’s cuts to public education. Even if this additional tax were to be put into place, what happens when the state pushes teacher pensions onto the local communities resulting in even further budgeting problems? The issues with a county sales tax increase don’t start or end there.
First, as a close friend of mine stated, “raising taxes is a fix for a symptom, not a fix the actual cause”. Raising the sales tax doesn’t address the issue that many school district budgets are still bloated despite the cries & moans of school boards & the teacher unions about cuts. Ask yourself, how much money is eaten up by your district’s Superintendent & administration? How much money is spent on needless things like new basketball goals that light up when time hits zero on the scoreboard? In southern Illinois, two things reign supreme in school districts – administrators & sports. School boards are elected & many don’t want to make the tough decisions. Why not raise property taxes? Because that action is directly felt by the community at large & would be widely unpopular whereas a sales tax is felt indirectly.
Second, an increase in sales tax to our school districts, at least in my county, is a redistributive tax on my city. My city is at the crossroads of I57/70 & accounts for about 85% of the local sales tax generated. The notion behind this proposed sales tax increase is the school sales tax would be collected and distributed according to school population/size. In my community, my city would contribute the most by far to the sales tax pool yet only receive roughly 52% of the funds. The other 48% of the funds would be filtered to the area county school districts.
Third, sales tax revenue is not a revenue stream that is constant or that always increases. In fact, our city’s sales taxes are generally flat over this time last year & were actually down last year as a whole. School districts think that increasing the sales tax is the cash cow they have been waiting for but in reality, it won’t be & is only a temporary fix to a much larger problem.
There is some good news though. Many community leaders, local elected officials & business owners are opposed to increasing the sales tax & getting such an increased passed by public vote will be difficult if not impossible.
The time has come for school districts to consider consolidation of smaller districts. Neither the school districts nor the people that live within them can sustain the budgets to run these schools. Will our children’s education be hurt by consolidation? No, outside maybe a longer bus ride in the morning & afternoon. However, cuts should not all be focused on classrooms or activities. In our county, the county schools districts have 800 less students in them than 10 years ago yet our county school districts have the same amount, if not more administrators for those districts than 10 years ago. Big problem in my eyes.
Asking people to continue to fund an often bloated government whether local, state or federal is wrong. To fund that bloated government on the backs of the people working harder just to get by these days – directly or indirectly – is even more wrong. We cannot tax our way to prosperity. We cannot tax our way to balanced budgets. We cannot tax our way to fixing a broken system of public education funding.
