Tag Archive for 'georgia budget'

Education in Georgia: A Dream Within A Nightmare!

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Wilson
on June 24, 2008
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There was a time when just about every parent in America had a dream regarding their child’s education. Prior to WWII the dream was that their child would graduate from high school. After the war, the GI Bill, helped inspire the idea that your kid would, could, should graduate from college. Today, it seems we have progressed backwards, and just hope they don’t drop out of high school

I wanted to interview Tim Callahan, Director of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE), to find out what he thought about HB 1133, the bill passed by the Georgia Legislature in 2008, which gave taxpayers (including corporations) a tax credit, up to about $7,500, for contributions to scholarships for private schools. Private school scholarships? Never heard of one, except maybe the $500 one the local civic club has set up. Boy, I bet this kind of tax credit will make private schools scholarship funds take off.

You need to understand this is a tax credit, folks, not a deduction, which means each dollar contributed to the private school is a dollar in taxes that someone else has to pay. That someone else is you and me!

I had previously interviewed Randy Hicks of the Georgia Family Council about this legislation. Randy and GFC think this kind of legislation is just great, and it probably is, but for whom? I don’t think it does anything to make education better in Georgia. I wanted to find out what educators thought about this kind of tax policy and just as I expected, PAGE thinks it is a bad idea.

Tim makes one thing clear: public education in Georgia is underfunded, signficantly so. I am sure a lot of us remember several decades ago when Georgia, under the leadership of Governor Joe Frank Harris, enacted QBE, Quality Basic Education Act. The goal of QBE was to evaluate the needs of our educational system, our public education system, and fund it 100%. The idea back then was probably that Georgia was low in the rankings of states when it came to the funding and quality of public education. Georgia wanted to prepare for the future and passed QBE. And that was the last thought of the future.

QBE has never been properly funded. Education has suffered. We blame the educators for poor results and use the poor results to continue to underfund education. It is a stupid cycle. Groups like the Georgia Family Council are doing everything they can to divert funds from public education to private schools because they, and the interests they represent, send their kids to private schools. They don’t care one iota about public education, which pretty much proves to me that GFC ought to take “Family” out of its name and replace it with “Taxpayer”! They never hesitate to gripe about the quality of our public schools, but they don’t care to fight to improve them. They don’t fight to make the legislature adequately fund QBE. No, they want it to fail or they just don’t care.

Everytime I interview a Republican legislator about education funding, I hear the same old response: we are spending more on education than ever before. So what? I am spending more on gas and food than ever before and I wouldn’t call that progress! The reason we spend more than ever before on education is because we have more students than ever before, but that does not mean we are spending more or spending enough. That is an entirely different question. That is the question that QBE was intended to answer: How much is enough?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not head over heels in love with public education. There are a lot of bad teachers. There are a lot of bad administrators. There is a lot of waste. There is a lot that needs to be done to improve it. My point is that underfunding it is not the answer. Funneling money to private schools is not the answer. Making taxpayers pay to send anyone’s kid to public school violates every conservative principal of government I know of. The people that support such propositions are acting are not conservatives. They don’t have a philosophy of government. All they have is an agenda.

 
 Tim Callahan, Director of PAGE [28:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (327)

Common Cause-Georgia: Legislative Priorities!

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Wilson
on April 1, 2008
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Common Cause of Georgia has several legislative intiatives which are (or should be) important to us all. In this interview, Bill Bozarth, Executive Director, and Jim Kulstad, their lobbyist, discuss their hopes for the 2008 Georgia Legislature.

While the budget and tax reform aren’t generally the focus of Common Cause, they did point out that they are concerned that the House eliminated funds from the Secretary of State’s budget to provide for voter education regarding the new Voter ID requirements. They hope to get these funds restored during the budget process.

At center stage of Common Cause’s priorities is SB 372 which seeks to give counties and cities a shove in the direction of ethics reform. Got a problem with a county commissioner or city councilman giving a buddy a contract to provide some service to the local government? What do you do? At this time there is not much you can do other than at the polls, unless the local paper publicizes the matter. If this legislation passes, citizens would have the right to file an ethics complaint. Only time will tell if such efforts will actually accomplish anything, but anything that helps shed the light of day on politicians and government has my support.

If you have been paying attention to the controversy over the planned development of the beach at Jekyll Island, you will want to know that Senator Jeff Chapman’s efforts to get the legislature to do something (anything really) to limit development of the beach have been rebuffed by the gurus of development-at-all-cost, the Georgia Republican Party. There is just too damn much money going to be made by Linger Longer, Mercer Reynolds and good ole Republican contributors to Gov. Perdue to let this gold mine get stopped by something as silly as the will of the people of Georgia. I have a lot of respect for Sen. Chapman who seems to be focused on trying to do what is right. I just wonder if his struggles to get the attention of the Republican leaders in the Georgia legislature might get him to change parties.

From my perspective, one of the Common Cause initiatives of utmost importance is judicial election reform. I don’t care whether you are conservative or liberal, you should want our courts to be fair, but above all, independent. Judicial elections were never a big deal and then the Supreme Court (US, and BTW not elected) gave us Roe v Wade, the abortion decision. While the efforts to change the Supreme Court dealt with judicial appointments, it has been broadened into attacks on state courts and state judicial elections. This undermining of the American judicial system is organized and funded by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Their goal: elect conservative judges who would favor business interest. As a result, these bastards of business target judges in various states. The Chamber has basked in successfully attacking good judges in several states such as Mississippi and West Virginia. They tried in 2006 to elect their guy, Mike Wiggins, to the Supreme Court of Georgia. They failed but that doesn’t mean they won’t keep coming.

But the bad side of the Chamber’s efforts to politicize the judiciary is that a race for the Supreme Court can now cost a million dollars or more. I don’t know how you can expect a judge who is supposed to be non-political, fair and independent to go out and raise a million dollars. Common Cause wants to change all that and have judicial elections publically funded. You can read more about the proposal here, and you can sign a petition supporting this endeavor here.

Common Cause doesn’t really expect the legislation to pass this session and is forcusing on a public awareness campaign. A resolution in the House would establish a study committee to study judicial elections and make recommendations at the 2009 session.

 
 Bill Bozarth, Common Cause of Georgia [29:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (262)

The Georgia Budget!

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Wilson
on March 30, 2008
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Alan Essig gives us his thoughts on the Georgia budget. The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute seeks to improve the fiscal responsibility of our state government. That’s quite a job these days!

I must admit I was surprised to find out that the 2008 Supplemental Budget, which the legislature passed and the Governor signed, doesn’t balance. According to Alan, it exceeds the Governor’s revenue estimates by some $65 million. When the legislature passed the supplemental budget they used parliarmentary procedure to force the Governor to either sign or veto the budget within 6 days. That meant the Governor would have to make a decision before the legislature adjourned. Apparently, the Governor did not want a nasty fight like they had last year and signed the supplemental budget even though it did not balance.

Alan was highly complimentary of Gov. Perdue and the fact that he had managed to accummulate more than $1 billion in reserve funds for the State. For those of you that don’t know, these reserve funds are like a savings account that the State can utilize when there is a budget shortfall. Each year the governor is required to make an estimate of anticipated revenue. The legislature is required to limit State spending to the revenue estimated by the Governor which results in the balanced budget required by the State Constitution. However, by being conservative in estimating revenue, the budget is kept low and if revenues exceed the governor’s estimate, the excess revenue is placed in the reserve fund, money the State collected, but did not spend.

Both the House and the Senate are considering tax cuts. In the House it is the remnant of the Speaker’s Great Tax Plan, which now targets eliminating the propety tax on automobiles. This would result in a budget shortfall of about $700 million in revenues. Alan suggests that it be made up with an increas in the cigarette tax of $1 per pack. Currently, Georgia collects a cigarette tax of about $.35 per pack, one of the lowest in the country.

In the Senate it is Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s proposal to cut the income tax by 10%. According to Alan, the Senate’s tax cut would result in a $220 - $230 million budget shortfall. I might add that in a recent interview with Casey Cagle, he indicated that a 10% cut in income taxes would stimulate the economy enough to generate the additional revenues. Alan says state income tax cuts do not stimulate the economy. That only happens, if it happens, with federal tax cuts because the federal government doesn’t have to live with a balanced budget.

Alan also agrees with Governor Perdue that both the Senate and House tax cuts are irresponsible, particularly when we may be heading toward a recession. Alan points out that Georgia ranks 49th and 50th among the states in low taxation and expenditure. That sounds great, but it also means we are lowest among the states in spending for education and health care.

Alan points out that 75% of the state budget is spent on education, Peachcare and Medicaid and prisions. With our high moral standards, Georgia loves to put people in jail for non-violent crimes and keep them there a long time. In fact, Georgia is second only to that Republican bastion of Texas when it comes to the percentage of the population behind bars.

And those prsioners get free health care. The older the prison population becomes, the sicker they get and the more our budget is going to be devoted to prisons, all to the detriment of education and health care for our children and elderly and poor.

What does the future hold? Alan says the housing crisis has not affected Georgia as much as other states, even though we are still one of the highest states in foreclosure rates. Tax cuts at this time jeopardize our economic future. According to Alan, the problem for Georgia’s future is to figure out how we are going to pay for the level of education, the infrastructure and transportation we need to support a population growth to 14 million people. Thus far, our annual budget does not take into consideration what we need to provide for and plan for the future, but is limited to looking at what government cost last year and what can we do to not increast the budget this year.

Sounds like a recipe cooked up by politicians seeking re-election, rather than leaders seeking to safeguard our future and that of our children. So, what else is new?

 
 Alan Essig, Georgia Budget and Policy Institute [31:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (316)