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"I
am a Democrat because despite our failures, our
missteps and our excesses, we know that waging a war
on poverty does not mean fighting the individuals
who are poor." Gov. Mark R. Warner, as
quoted in the Washington Post, Fairfax Extra,
June 19, 2003.
Implicit
in Gov. Warner's remark, like in Doug Koelemay's indictment of the Northern Virginia
anti-tax movement ("Mad
Hatter's Tea Party", April 28, 2003), is the
belief that if only taxes were higher, all problems
would be solved.
But
if
higher taxes were the solution, all problems
would have been solved already.
First,
let us define the term “tax increase.”
A
tax increase occurs whenever the taxes paid per
individual go up. A
real tax increase occurs whenever the taxes
paid per individual increase faster than inflation. Therefore,
if government spending increased no faster than
inflation and the growth in population, individuals would not
experience real tax increases.
By
that definition, here in Fairfax
County residents have experienced substantial real tax increases:
County and state revenues have been
increasing much faster than population and
inflation.
Since
the current Fairfax County Board of Supervisors was
elected four years ago, it has raised the typical
household’s real estate taxes five times faster
than inflation. The Board did so by making only
token reductions in the real estate tax rate while
residential assessments increased 60 percent. This
occurred even though the current board chairman and
a current supervisor, who is now the Democrat
candidate for chairman, both stated four years ago
that they would not raise taxes after the election.
Over
the same period the state of Virginia took in, on
the average, an extra $2.7 billion per year from
revenue increases in excess of population growth and
inflation. The cumultative total for Virginia since
1997 is, therefore, more than $18 billion. Isn't
that more than enough money to fix transportation?
Fairfax
County
real revenues and spending have reached new record
highs each of the last four years, which is one of
the county government's best-kept secrets.
State
revenues adjusted for population and
inflation, while lower than at the peak of the
dot-com bubble, are still near record levels, which
is another well-kept secret.
The state’s alleged $6 billion-dollar
budget deficit was not a shortfall in year-to-year
spending but a shortfall from overly optimistic
revenue projections made during the dot-com bubble.
While
the state and local tax take has soared, very little
new revenue has gone to transportation -- the sector
that, arguably, suffers the most desperate
shortfalls. The county, which correctly regards
transportation as a state responsibility, spends
little on transportation. As for the state, only 10
percent of its new tax revenue since 1997 has gone
to transportation. Indeed, last year, the state
diverted transportation revenues earmarked from the
sales tax to the general fund.
For
all practical purposes, the state's major revenue sources, income and sales taxes,
are off-limits to transportation. They are
monopolized, instead, by social spending: public schools, public colleges,
welfare, and prisons.
Last
year the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review
Commission (JLARC) published a study of state
spending trends between 1981 and 2001 (Review
of State Spending: June 2002 Update).
The
JLARC found that over that period,
inflation-adjusted spending for public schools
increased nearly 10 times faster than
enrollment. The
inflation-adjusted budgets for public four-year
colleges increased four times faster than
enrollment. The
number of Medicaid recipients increased four
times faster than overall population.
Medicaid spending, which is the state's
fastest growing budget item, increased seven
times faster than overall population.
The state inmate population increased nine
times faster than overall population.
However,
transportation funding increased only slightly
faster than population growth and much slower than
the increase in vehicle miles traveled.
Members
of the legislature can be forgiven for
being unaware of these spending figures.
The numbers only appear on a table in page 11
of the report. The
JLARC authors did not see fit to mention these
spending increases in either the narrative or the
summary.
An
analysis by the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance
shows that
Virginia
inflation-adjusted transportation spending per
resident is the same today as it was in 1979.
Social spending has been growing by leaps and bounds
at the county level too. Since the current school
superintendent took office in 1998, school
inflation-adjusted spending has increased more than
twice as fast as enrollment. Inflation-adjusted
spending per student has increased well over 10
percent. Public school spending per
student has hit another record high.
This
has been going on for decades.
Over the past 30 years, Fairfax County Public
Schools staff has increased nearly four times
faster than enrollment while inflation-adjusted
spending per student has more than doubled.
County inflation-adjusted welfare spending
per resident has nearly tripled. The county's
jail inmate population has, like the state's,
increased eight times faster than overall
population.
Of
the Fairfax
County Public School system's 21,000 employees, only
13,000 are teachers. Of those, only 7,300 are Kindergarten though
12th grade regular classroom teachers. While
staff size has mushroomed, school test scores have
stagnated, classes have gotten overcrowded, and
building maintenance has gone under-funded.
The
outcome of lavishing resources on the school systems
has not been encouraging. Since the late '80s, the number of expulsion
cases sent to the superintendent has increased
twenty-fold, from about 30 per year to over 600 per
year.
In
its all-important role of providing economic
opportunity through education to low-income
populations, public schools are a failure as
demonstrated by the chronic minority student
achievement gap. This
gap is largely due to the public schools' adamant
refusal to use phonics-based reading instruction.
The result is that children from homes that
do not read still do not learn to read.
The
main effect of welfare spending is to incentivize
poverty by encouraging out-of-wedlock births.
Since the advent of massive welfare spending
under President Lyndon Johnson's "War on
Poverty" in the 60s, the percentage of
African-American children born out of wedlock has
increased from 20 percent to 69 percent.
(For whites, the percentage has increased
from 2 percent to 22 percent.)
Despite
welfare reform, unwed mothers still qualify for
subsidized housing, subsidized food, subsidized
medical care, and subsidized childcare.
Two-thirds of Medicaid recipients are welfare
mothers.
Social
spending traps our most vulnerable citizens in
poverty. Public
schools fail to teach low-income children to read.
Welfare destroys their families.
Our busy jails then house the casualties of
public school and welfare systems.
There
is a similarity between today's welfare state and
pre-Civil War slavery.
Slavery destroyed Black families at the
auction block. Today
welfare destroys Black families with the subsidy
check. Also,
it used to be illegal to teach a slave to read.
Just the ability to read, it was thought,
would empower a person to be independent.
Today, we are still not teaching low-income
children how to read.
In
speaking of the war on poverty, it is clear why Gov.
Warner felt compelled to acknowledge “our
failures, our missteps and our excesses.”
However, the ones oppressing the poor are
those who perpetuate a welfare state that traps
people in poverty rather than providing them a way
to independence.
Both
the transportation crisis and our inexorably
increasing taxes have the same cause: The spiraling
effect of destructive social spending that creates
the demand for even more social spending.
There will never be enough taxes for the social
spenders.
Taxes
and spending are at or near record highs.
To fix transportation and to lower taxes, we
must first stop using tax increases to destroy
families in the name of compassion.
--
July 14, 2003
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