I am a Tax-O-Phobe!

Previously, I talked about the Texas public education financing problem. An editorial in the Houston Chronicle has branded myself and others like me as tax-o-phobes:

For the record, taxation is not a communist plot, and few, if any, public schools provide spa memberships for their teachers and free Super Bowl tickets or around-the-world cruises for their superintendents.

Texas schools have their problems, and if we are lucky our state leaders will soon begin to address some of them, beginning with a fairer and more adequate way of paying the tab for our children's future. But even the politicians who love to criticize the schools also love (during re-election season) to brag about the improvements in student test scores.

Teachers, principals and superintendents obviously are doing a lot of things right. They are not simply tossing tax dollars to the wind.

Yet, every time a school administrator, a member of the media or an elected official dares to point out that Texas needs to increase education funding -- as many people are pointing out these days -- the tax-o-phobes rise up to scream about bloated school budgets and thieves on the school board.

Clay Robison isn't really addressing the stance I take towards the public funding of education, but his comments are worth noting because they seem to echo at least a plurality of public opinion.

A tax-o-phobe isn't someone who simply dislikes taxes. Most of us dislike taxes but recognize they are necessary and, sooner or later, will rise. By my measure, a tax-o-phobe is someone who either is rabidly opposed to taxes, even to the point of wanting to see some governmental functions crippled, or someone who pretends to hate all taxes but, in truth, represents special interests who simply want someone else to foot the bill.

Ah, but I do dislike taxes, in all forms. :)

And I'm also for the deliberate crippling of many government functions through revenue starvation.

Mr. Robison's last sentence there is interesting. It sounds like he dislikes people who want others to foot the bills for their actions, labeling them with the dreaded "special interests" moniker. What he doesn't realize - or refuses to acknowledge - is that public-funded education is a prime example of getting others to foot your bills and the education lobby is one of the largest special interests in the country.

Some tax dollars are inevitably wasted because they are spent by humans of varying degrees of competence and honesty, and there are continued efforts by the media, citizen watchdog groups and government officials to expose and correct those problems.

But don't kid yourself, or let the tax-o-phobes fool you. Clamping down on wasteful spending -- although essential -- makes little more than a scratch or two in Texas' overall education budget, now upwards of $30 billion a year, according to the Texas Education Agency.

Sure, that's a lot of money, and most of it is paid locally by property owners. But Texas has a lot of schoolchildren -- more than 4 million -- and the average expenditure, according to the TEA, is about $7,000 per child, although that cost varies among school districts.

Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Bitching about institutional waste and corruption is pointless because those things happen in large organizations and hierarchies. Private schools suffer from the same kinds of human errors and conditions as public schools. What matters is who pays for that waste. The answer to that question should not be "the taxpayer."

Posted by Drizzten at February 04, 2004 09:41 AM