This is what it looks like when you balance a state budget on the backs of working families:
The Philadelphia school district may have to cut 3,800 positions in order to close a $600 million deficit. Another proposal to make up for the loss of almost $300 million in state funds this year includes eliminating free transportation to and from school.
That means no busing or free SEPTA transpasses for any students except those in special education students and those attending charter schools.
That’s because state law requires the district to provide transportation to and from charter schools. But students who attend public and parochial schools next year could have to pay their own way.
Note two things there. One is just the sheer volume of cuts that will have to be made, one way or another. The other is that charter schools—which don’t have to serve all the city’s students, don’t have to keep the most disadvantaged and troubled—are exempt from some key cuts. The agenda is privatization using public funding.
(Via Atrios)
Tags: Education, state budgets
In the last few months, public sector employees have become the economic scapegoats. Governors and state legislatures around the country are claiming that their budget problems and shortfalls are due, not to the Great Recession, but to the overwhelming burden of public employee’s salaries and pensions.
James P. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has something to say to these politicians today in the Detroit News:
It’s time for a reality check. Government employees did not blow a hole in any state budget, including Michigan. Economist Dean Baker points out that shortfalls were almost entirely caused by the recession. “If revenue had increased in step with normal growth (2.4 percent real growth, plus inflation), state and local governments would have had an additional $290 billion since the start of the downturn,” Baker notes.
Public employees didn’t create a huge housing bubble. Wall Street did that. And public employees didn’t cause the Great Recession through reckless speculation. Wall Street did that, too.
State governments didn’t get $3 trillion dollars in loans from the Federal Reserve and profit from those loans by relending them. Again, that was Wall Street.
It’s also important to remember, as economist Robert Reich points out, that the typical public employee’s pension is only $19,000 a year.
These attacks on working families and government workers are nothing more than divide-and-conquer tactics aimed at weakening or eliminating all unions. “
Tags: public sector workers, state budgets
Yesterday Kim wrote about the kinds of cuts being made to education funding in our communities and states. At the same time that school budgets are being slashed, a number of families are in dire financial straits. One program that is really feeling the pinch of family finances is school lunches. From the NY Times:
The school district in Albuquerque was among several last year to start serving cold sandwiches and milk, instead of full hot meals, to students whose parents had not paid what they owed. In Wake County, N.C., those students may eat as many fruits and vegetables as they want, but not the rest of the lunch offerings.
In Louisiana, some districts did not feed the children whose parents were in arrears at all, until, in November, the State Legislature passed a law ordering that they be given at least a snack, while directing districts to notify child welfare authorities if a student got just a snack on more than three consecutive days. Framingham, Mass., hired a constable to hand-deliver notices to parents whose bills were still unpaid after the schools had sent them several letters alerting them to their debt.
At least in Albuquerque and Wake County the schools were feeding the kids. Withholding food from children is something I cannot begin to understand.
In NY City:
Since 2004, the city has absorbed at least $42 million in unpaid lunch fees.
But that is a luxury it can no longer afford, according to the Education Department, which has weathered several rounds of budget cuts, with more to come. The department has been telling principals to collect overdue lunch money or risk having it docked from their school budgets.
Of the city’s 1,600 schools, 1,043 owe a collective $2.5 million to the department for meals served in the first three months of this school year. That puts them on track to be $8 million behind by the end of the school year.
Penalizing children for the desperate financial straits their parents are in, combined with cuts to education is a sad, sad commentary on our national priorities.
Tags: Education, school lunch, state budgets
Our schools should be palaces. Our kids only deserve the best. Education is the key to the future.
Political rhetoric is falling short this year as states across the country are in the midst of budget shortfalls and slashing education spending. Our public schools are already making due with less and further cuts will cripple them. In Pennsylvania, the state is cutting funding by $1 billion:
Less than three weeks after taking office, Gov. Tom Corbett is swinging the budget axe at public schools. Schools may lose up $1 billion in state aid in the coming school year, setting up one of three scenarios.
Homeowners could see substantial property tax increases. School boards may slash programs and jobs in the coming school year. Or families may take a hit to their wallets and still see school programs or jobs wiped out…
(snip)
How big is a $1 billion loss? It amounts to about a fifth of the $5.1 billion that the state budgeted for basic education this year. That is by far the biggest source of money outside of property taxes that most districts receive.
“It doesn’t matter if you are a big district, a small district, an urban district, a suburban district, rich or poor,” said Harrisburg School District’s business manager Jeff Bader.
“You are going to have some funding gap that’s going to have to be made up either through cuts to programs or layoffs or at the expense of taxpayers.””
Pennsylvania isn’t alone. At least 34 states have had to make cuts to K-12 education. From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Arizona eliminated preschool for 4,328 children, funding for schools to provide additional support to disadvantaged children from preschool to third grade, aid to charter schools, and funding for books, computers, and other classroom supplies. The state also halved funding for kindergarten, leaving school districts and parents to shoulder the cost of keeping their children in school beyond a half-day schedule.
California reduced K-12 aid to local school districts by billions of dollars and cut a variety of programs, including adult literacy instruction and help for high-needs students.
Colorado has reduced public school spending in FY 2011 by $260 million, nearly a 5 percent decline from the previous year. The cut amounts to more than $400 per student…
Missouri is cutting its funding for K-12 transportation by 46 percent. The cut in funding likely will lead to longer bus rides and the elimination of routes for some of the 565,000 students who rely on the school bus system.
New Jersey cut funding for afterschool programs aimed to enhance student achievement and keep students safe between the hours of 3 and 6 p.m. The cut will likely cause more than 11,000 students to lose access to the programs and 1,100 staff workers to lose their jobs.
North Carolina cut by 21 percent funding for a program targeted at small schools in low-income areas and with a high need for social workers and nurses. As a result, 20 schools will be left without a social worker or nurse. The state also temporarily eliminated funding for teacher mentoring…
Sadly, the list goes on and on.
Tags: Education, state budgets
California has an enormous deficit. Incoming Governor Jerry Brown laid out what the NY Times referred to as his “Grinch-like budget.”
The budget is meant to address an estimated $25.4 billion deficit, just the latest shortfall for a state that has experienced a drumbeat of bad economic news in recent years. But Mr. Brown, who took office last week, cast the blame even further, saying the state’s leaders had spent the last decade balancing their books with “gimmicks and tricks and unrealistic expectations that pushed this state deeper and deeper into debt.”
But that period, Mr. Brown repeatedly emphasized, was over.
He’s spreading the pain around a little, but as always budgets are balanced on the backs of the poor:
In terms of sheer dollars, the steepest cuts affect the most vulnerable in the state, including a $1.7 billion cut to Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for poor families and disabled people; a $1.5 billion reduction in its welfare-to-work program; and $750 million cut from the agency that provides services to those with developmental disabilities.
The state’s higher education system — including the highly regarded University of California — would lose $1.4 billion. The president of the university, Mark G. Yudof, who has dealt with protests at several campuses over tuition increases, called it “a sad day for California,” but he seemed to recognize the gravity of the state’s bind.
Those darned poor people have lousy lobbyists.
Illinois is also in deficit trouble:
Many states are struggling with anemic revenues and the prospect of an end to additional federal funds, but Illinois faces a budget deficit of as much as $15 billion, owes some $8 billion in unpaid bills to social service agencies, doctors, dentists and others, and is receiving mounting signs of worry from bond investors.
Their solution:
With only hours left before new state lawmakers were to take over, Illinois’s State Legislature narrowly approved early on Wednesday an increase of about 66 percent in the state’s income tax rate.
That’s a substantial increase.
Under the legislation, the income tax rate would, at least temporarily, rise to 5 percent from its current rate of 3 percent. Lawmakers had talked about an even steeper increase, but set that aside as the hours went by and the debate grew increasingly emotional. The rate for corporate taxes would rise to 7 percent from its current rate of 4.8 percent. As part of the deal, the state’s spending growth would be limited from one year to the next over the next four years.
Despite the constantly dangled carrot of “economic recovery” by economists – most states are in financial trouble. Huge levels of unemployment have resulted in revenue streams that are barely trickling. Still – as I wander through the world, I hear no acknowledgement in the mainstream media or from any of our elected officials of how serious the jobless rate really is. Until Americans are working again, states are going to continue to have to make these sorts of choices.
Tags: state budgets
From CNN Money:
The number of first-time filers for unemployment benefits fell to 445,000 in the week ended Oct. 2, down 11,000 from the week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
The number was lower than economists’ forecasts of 455,000, according to consensus estimates by Briefing.com, but it still fell in a range that analysts say points to weakness in the job market.
and after a little bit of a tapdance, at the very end of the article:
On Friday, Wall Street will turn its attention to the government’s monthly jobs report. Economists polled by Briefing.com forecast the report to show the economy added no jobs in September, and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.7% from 9.6% in August.
What they’re trying hard not to come out and say is: while there was a slight drop in the numbers of folks who filed unemployment claims, the unemployment rate is still going up.
In other, related, bad news, cities in financial trouble are looking for state funds. From the NY Times:
Across the country, a growing number of towns, cities and other local governments are seeking refuge in similar havens that many states provide as alternatives to federal bankruptcy court. Pennsylvania will have 20 cities and smaller communities in its distressed-cities program if Harrisburg receives approval. Michigan has 37 in its program; New Jersey has seven; Illinois, Rhode Island and California each have at least one. This is on top of troubled housing, power and hospital authorities.
The increasingly common pleas for state assistance — after two relatively quiet decades — reflect the yawning local budget deficits that have appeared in the last two years.
and
Worse yet, the municipal requests for state assistance could spell problems for already beleaguered state finances. One head of a municipal bond trading desk at a major Wall Street firm said he worried more about problems bubbling up from the local level than he did about the possibility of a sudden state collapse.
If the downturn is prolonged and deep, and local governments fail to act aggressively, he said, dozens of small communities could be pushed into the arms of a state, weighing it down so much that it, too, would need a bailout. Something like that happened in Arkansas during the Great Depression, causing the only default by a state on general-obligation bonds in United States history.
Until jobs begin to appear in huge numbers, tax revenues are going to continue to drop, and demand for services will continue to rise. There doesn’t seem to be any willingness on the part of the media or amongst our elected officials to acknowledge how desperate the situation really is, never mind propose any solutions.
Tags: state budgets, unemployment
To roads being turned to gravel, senior year of high school being made optional, public bus systems being shut down and libraries being closed, add another effect of state and municipal budget crises: firehouse brownouts.
Fire departments that can’t keep all their units open at any one time are instituting “rolling brownouts,” in which today the firehouse down the block from me might be closed and tomorrow it will be open while the one in your neighborhood across town will be closed. According to the New York Times, this is increasingly widespread—the article mentions Philadelphia, Baltimore, Sacramento, San Diego.
Firehouse closures don’t just affect the response time for fires. Increasingly, emergency medical response teams are part of fire departments, so people in cities with brownouts don’t just have to worry about facing a relatively rare fire. Much more common medical emergencies are suddenly a far graver concern: A heart attack, a fall down the stairs, being hit by a car. Or choking:
The risks of cutting fire service were driven home here last month when Bentley Do, a 2-year-old boy who was visiting relatives, somehow got his hands on a gum ball, put it in his mouth, started laughing and then began choking.
“It blocked the air hole,” said his uncle, Brian Do, who called 911 while other relatives frantically tried to dislodge the gum ball. “No air could flow in and out.”
It is only 600 steps from the front door of the neatly kept stucco home where the boy was staying to the nearest fire station, just down the block. But the station was empty that evening: its engine was in another part of town, on a call in an area usually covered by an engine that had been taken out of service as part of a brownout plan.
The police came to the home within five minutes and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, officials said. But it took nine and a half minutes — almost twice the national goal of arriving within five minutes — for the fire engine, with a paramedic and more medical equipment, to get there. An ambulance came moments later and took Bentley to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Maybe that little boy would have died anyway. But wouldn’t you rather the question wasn’t out there? His family would, and they’re publicizing his story to draw attention to the problem.
State and municipal budget crises bring the overall economic crisis into sharp focus. If we can’t look at gravel roads and disappearing public transit and closed libraries and firehouses and see that something needs to be done, will Bentley Do’s story be enough? How much more of this will our government tune out before acting to end the crisis?
Tags: economy, state budgets
Laura mentioned Paul Krugman’s excellent op-ed. He and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald have been thinking along similar lines. Here are some of the stories that inspired them:
The city of Camden, NJ is permanently closing its library system by the end of the year:
Camden is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.
At an emotional but sparsely attended meeting of the library board Thursday, its president, Martin McKernan, said the city’s three libraries cannot stay open past Dec. 31 because of severe budget cuts by Mayor Dana L. Redd.
“It’s extraordinary, it’s appalling,” McKernan said.
All materials in the libraries would be donated, auctioned, stored, or destroyed. That includes 187,000 books, historical documents, artifacts, and electronic equipment. Keeping materials in the shuttered buildings is a fire hazard, officials said, and would make them vulnerable to vandalism and vermin.
Camden is a city of over 500,000 people, who will have no access to free books or to free library computers and internet.
Ripping up the roads:
Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.
In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.
Remember when America’s roadways and highways were something to be proud of?
Utah looks at making the senior year of high school optional:
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republican’s assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high school, but faced vehement opposition from other quarters, including in his hometown of West Jordan.
“My parents are against it,” Williams said. “All the teachers at the school are against it. I’m against it.”
Buttars has since toned down the idea, suggesting instead that senior year become optional for students who complete their required credits early. He estimated the move could save up to $60 million, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
There’s more. In the NY Times we learn of a Georgia public bus system being shut down completely:
Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
and Hawaii furloughed schools:
Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation and sending working parents scrambling to find care for them.
We’re in a big, big mess – and there aren’t any real solutions being offered. Cutting taxes for the wealthy isn’t going to dig us out of this hole. Worrying about the deficit isn’t going to dig us out. Cutting food stamps or Social Security isn’t the way forward. President Obama has said that everything other than defense is on the chopping block. We are supporting over 1000 overseas military bases. Is this really making us stronger or safer? If we can cut food to hungry families without even blinking, we shouldn’t be afraid of reevaluating how we spend our defense dollars.
Tags: Education, public services, public transit, state budgets, sustainable governance
By Kim McMurray — Pennsylvania
This week, a new report by the Rockefeller Foundation showed that Americans are more economically insecure now than in the past three decades. The report measured the percentage of people who saw a household income decrease of 25% or more in the past year. More Americans are facing complete economic devastation. They are out of savings. They need to choose between a mortgage payment and food. They don’t know where to turn.
This isn’t breaking news for the Working America community. Every night, we go out and talk to people who are experiencing financial hardships because of the economic downturn. It seems like everyone has a story about unemployment. It could be her son who graduated college two years ago but is still living at home. His sister-in-law who prays he won’t get sick. Or her husband who spends his days on their couch battling depression.
Things started to look up. Congress passed an unemployment benefit extension and for the first time in eight years, the Pennsylvania Senate passed a budget on time. You would think that there would be a collective sigh of relief in the Commonwealth that finally, finally, something passed on time, but the new budget cut essential services that working families depend on, especially in this time of economic need.
Our member’s stories are not unique. Rather, they are far, far too common. Howard was laid off two years ago and he has been unable to find work since. He sends out applications each week and is currently working to complete his GED at a job training program near Allentown. His family is now facing foreclosure. This is the time when the Hillers need state services the most, but housing and legal assistance have both seen drastic cuts and are stretched thin.
Lorraine runs a day care business in Philadelphia. She has been working in the industry for over ten years. She built her business with the help of the Keystone Stars program which provides resources so that childcare providers can enhance early education programs. The children in her care benefitted directly from these resources and Lorraine was able to build her business, though she still has further to go. However, this program as well as other early education programs were severely cut this year and will be forced to shorten their reach.
The solutions are simple. Instead of cutting essential services that families rely on, our elected officials need to close the corporate tax loopholes that allow big businesses to get away with not paying their fair share. There are four main ways they can do this.
The first is to close the loophole which allows 70% of businesses in Pennsylvania to avoid paying income taxes. Multistate companies like WalMart avoid paying income taxes in Pennsylvania by setting up subsidiaries in tax-haven states like Delaware. These subsidiaries can be nothing more than a post office box. One address in Delaware is home to over 14,000 of these subsidiaries. Closing this loophole would bring over $616 million to the state annually which could go towards funding public schools, libraries, homeless shelters and mental health clinics, all of which experienced significant budget cuts this year.
Second, we have to close the tax breaks big corporations receive for collecting state sales tax. This outdated system allows corporations to keep 1% of the 6% sales tax for filing on time. The tax break dates back to shopkeepers manually calculating and collecting the tax. However, it is now collected by computer. It is a tax break which could bring in $74 million a year. The Scranton School for the Deaf, which lost 100% of its funding this year? $5.4 million.
Third, we need to impose a tax on smokeless tobacco products. Pennsylvania is one of two states that doesn’t do this. If Virginia and North Carolina can benefit from taxing tobacco products, so can Pennsylvania.
Last, we need to pass a strong natural gas severance tax. Pennsylvania has an abundance of natural gas and our citizens should benefit from its extraction. Instead they are left with poisoned drinking water and unsafe drilling methods as funding for safety inspections saw significant cuts.
With the unemployment level still hovering over 9%, our Pennsylvania Senators had a chance to show that they care about working families and their struggles by funding the programs that they depend on, but they chose to lend their support to corporations who refuse to pay their fair share. The fight is just beginning for next year.
The federal government, though it plays a huge role, is not the only body responsible for pulling our country out of this recession. The state governments need to play their part as well.
Tags: public services, state budgets, sustainable governance
Paul Krugman on what’s become of America:
…A country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
-snip-
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
Read the whole thing, if you haven’t already. (If you have, send it to a friend.)
Tags: Education, state budgets, sustainable governance, taxes
