More Spending Won't Produce Better Education
The State Newspaper
Monday, August 4
by Randy Page
Cindi Scoppe is right to editorialize against the poorly crafted property-sales tax swap of 2006, but certain details of her conclusions about school funding miss the mark. She worries that the burden of financing public schools has regressed onto the shoulders of middle- and low-income families through the expansion of the sales tax. Ms. Scoppe also notes that renters are bearing more of the costs and that lawmakers failed to reform the way money is distributed when they shifted the way taxes are collected. So far so good.
Her prescription is an overhaul of the tax code. But if we’re going to talk about the tax swap, what we need to talk about is how the end result was a tax hike. We also need to consider how much funding already goes to public schools, how fast the funding has grown and why only 44 cents on the dollar reaches the classroom in instructional spending
The tax swap of 2006 was bad public policy. By removing the school-operating portion of the property tax, lawmakers were able to soften the once-a-year sticker shock of a property tax bill. The pennies-per-day approach of a state sales tax is less politically damaging. However, local governments and school districts used the opportunity to raise millage, especially in 2006 before the baseline for transfers from the state was established. Homeowners saw lowered property bills in 2007, but not as low as if there had been a truly neutral swap. Property taxes are still assessed, and can be increased, on nonresidential properties, which businesses pass along to consumers through higher prices and lower wages.
On the spending side, Scoppe compares tax dollars for public schools with spending on fire service. This is both empirically and philosophically wrong. With more than $11,480 per student in public school spending in 2008, South Carolina spends hundreds more than its Southeastern neighbors. With a growing achievement gap between black and white students, and South Carolina’s “best” public schools lagging far behind their peers in North Carolina or Georgia, many parents are questioning how increased spending will reform the system.
Public spending on education is important for what economist Milton Friedman called “neighborhood effects.” The actions of uneducated individuals impose significant costs on other citizens. These include crime, uninformed political participation and the inability to productively engage in the economy. These costs justify government’s redistribution of wealth to pay for education, but they don’t justify inefficient public schools. Unlike police and fire services, public funding of K-12 education does not lend itself to a government monopoly. In South Carolina, state-issued pre-kindergarten and college scholarships are popular examples of a public good delivered through a more competitive market.
Finally, Ms. Scoppe’s suggestion that “school taxes pay to educate the children of South Carolina, not the children of the individual taxpayer” is troublesome. The state of South Carolina does not have any children of its own. Government is simply the framework in which individuals cooperate and a structure for balancing the benefits and burdens of that cooperation.
Many families who pay taxes find the public schools in South Carolina to be academically ineffective. Others worry that public schools transmit values in conflict with their own. When parents are compelled to remove children from public schools for these legitimate reasons, and are then forced to pay for schools they don’t utilize, the government is punishing families for responsible parenting.
Mr. Page is president of South Carolinians for Responsible Government, which promotes limited government, lower taxes and increased educational options. Reach him at randy@scrgov.org.
