Buy some bread so my kids can get an education.
My hometown votes to raise sales taxes by 1% (to 8%) in order to prepare a education fund to be used in the event of a split with the county school system. Due to a huge financial scandal in the recent past, the Jefferson County Board of Education has had to fight to regain the trust of parents and forestall drives by the various communities within the system to secede and form their own systems. For parents, the goal is having the best education for their kids. I have four children in the Trussville schools, and I have always been satisfied that the teachers have done an outstanding job. The administrators and teachers are responsive and caring.

The financial mess Jeffcoed stepped into was stupid and avoidable. So too were the moves by the Board to single Trussville out for punishment when it came time to cut the budget to correct the hemmoraging. Reneging on its financial commitments and disproportional cuts to teaching staff only increased the rumblings in the community for a pullout. The Board is right to push hard to keep municipalities from leaving--without a sufficient base of taxpayers, the entire system is in jeopardy, with poorer neighborhoods suffering the most--but parents and taxpayers are rightly leary of allowing their money to be again be flushed down a great big toilet.

The last few months have seen raprochement of sorts be made between the Board and the city, and it appears that should Trussville vote to leave the system, the Board will negotiate the transfer of assets in good faith. The question of how we will then fund our own schools then comes up again. As with every other public program, the short answer is taxes. But.

Most parents I know, including me, are willing to pay to support good schools. We don't want our money wasted, and we expect results. Human nature apparently makes us want to see if we can get anyone else to foot the bill, though, and such is the case with using sales taxes (or a cut from gambling, or a lottery, or sin taxes) to fund schools. The State of Alabama has just gone through a terrible bout of education budget proration. The cause? Reliance on volatile sales tax revenues, which fell far short of projections this year, to fund the education budget. The fluctuation of revenue can and will happen again, no matter the location, including here at home. Right now, Trussville enjoys a bounteous harvest of sales taxes from several large shopping centers which draw consumers far in excess of our population. That can change tomorrow. This also doesn't even touch the fact that sales taxes are regressive, and most hurt the poor (who benefit most by education).

Effective funding of schools requires a stable source of revenue. One way or another, the bill has to be paid. Sales taxes, lotteries, excise taxes on booze and smokes all have value, (and the allure of something-for-nothing) but none offer the necessary stability. Although it goes against the grain of Victim-Americans and Entitlement-Americans and Non-Product, Agricultural-Americans, the best source of adequate, stable revenue is either property or income taxes. Since local municipalities in Alabama are very limited in the way in which they can tax payrolls, that only leaves one other source. Let's do this--reduce (or even remove) the sales tax on groceries, and increase property taxes enough to make up for the lost grocery money and then enough to pay the local school bill. "Gee, that's gonna be expensive!" Yes, but you are the one who said you wanted to get out of the county system and pay your own way. It's just that now you don't have a million people helping pay the bills.
posted by Terry at 1:07:00 PM