Somewhat surprisingly, Washington’s GOP legislators sound like they want to comply with McCleary, and also fund the class size initiative. But they’re still adamantly opposed to raising taxes or new revenues. So what’s their hat trick? After all, we’re talking billions of dollars here. Simple, just redirect existing state revenues from other programs to education. Their motive? To drown the rest of state government in the proverbial bathtub.
I don’t think Republicans have suddenly fallen in love with public education. They still want to limit access to quality education to families of means. They don’t want their kids to grow up and have to compete against smart hardworking kids from the other side of the tracks for good jobs, wealth, and status. They strongly prefer a hereditary system of wealth and power.
No, that’s not it. Rather, education’s demand for more dollars serves a useful function for them. It plays into the hands of their small-government arguments. It gives them excuse to cut, cut, cut elsewhere in public programs because “the state constitution mandates education funding.” And constitutions, as we all know, are sacrosanct to the political right (except when they violate citizens’ civil liberties, start undeclared wars, secretly kidnap and torture people, etc.).
It won’t work. More than $10 billion has already been cut from state spending during the Great Recession and the slow recovery that has followed it. You can’t take state money away from the Department of Corrections without releasing dangerous felons, or from DSHS without kicking old folks out of nursing homes and not protecting children from abuse. There’s just nothing left to cut. And you can’t get that kind of money –billions of dollars — by squeezing the budgets of small agencies. Grabbing a million here and a million there doesn’t add up to a billion until you find a thousand millions, and there aren’t that many little million-dollar chunks of spending in state government. Nowhere near. And, anyway, many of those small agencies are supported by dedicated funded that can’t legally be used for anything else.
One certain target of GOP budget raiders is the $360 million or so that Governor Inslee has requested for state employee pay raises. Republicans hate public servants and don’t want to give them a dime. Never mind that state employees haven’t had a COLA for six years now; in Republican psyches, they’re still overpaid. As I recall, some years ago, a GOP legislator introduced a bill to pay state employees the minimum wage; it had no chance of passage, and no doubt was understood to be a symbolic gesture, but it expressed the contempt and hatred that Republicans feel for state employees simply for being public servants. They make it personal.
Republicans understand well enough that supply-and-demand works the same in labor markets as in other markets, and that if state jobs aren’t competitive in pay and benefits, people won’t train for state careers or apply for state jobs, and many state jobs will go unfilled or be filled with underqualified staffers who will leave as soon as they can find a better job. That’s exactly what Republicans want — an eviscerated state government with an ineffective workforce, to “get government off the backs” of the “producers.”
From a larger perspective, Republicans just don’t like public services, and they especially don’t like paying for them. No one likes paying taxes, but the GOP’s hatred of taxes has an irrational quality to it, and pretty much drives the rest of their thinking. Of course, hating government and hating taxes go hand-in-hand, and nicely complement each other.
But Washington’s voters didn’t choose Republican governance. Our legislator shouldn’t enact, and our governor shouldn’t sign, a Republican budget embodying that negative vision for our state. We need our schools, but we also need our other public services. The budget must provide for both. And because of McCleary — and if legislators want to fund the class-size initiative — the state needs more revenue. Now.
If something has to give, if anything is to be defunded or left unfunded, the class size initiative should be the first item put on the chopping block, because the drafters of this initiative and the voters who passed it provided no funding to implement it, and nowhere else in life do you get something without paying for it.
All of the foregoing discussion is a lead-in to Rep. Hans Dunshee’s excellent guest opinion in the Everett Herald, which you can (and should) read here: http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20150118/OPINION03/150119110 Some excerpts:
“Today’s booming economy is mostly helping the already rich. The number of homeless kids increased 12 percent over last year in our state.”
“The state Supreme Court ruled funding for public schools was inadequate and that education was the ‘paramount duty’ of the Legislature under our state constitution. Which is true. What’s untrue is this [Republican] myth that all we have to do is ‘fund education first’ while cutting everything else.”
“Real funding for our local schools means fixing a flawed, unfair tax structure that benefits the wealthy while hammering the middle class and working people.”
