Date: September 28th 2011

Get Off the Fence   by Bill Lyne   ufwsblog.org

Sit on a fence long enough and you end up with a fence post up your ass.

So now is the time for everyone in Washington’s public university community—students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, and trustees—to get off the fence and strongly support revenue solutions to the new state budget problem.

 

With the ink still drying on last year’s bi-partisan, sustainable, all-cuts budget, the state economist has predicted that tax revenues will be down another 1.4 billion. Much hubbub has ensued and on November 28 state legislators will head back to Olympia for a special session to try to put the house back in order.

Times like these are especially tough on public universities. Unlike those snotty kids in public schools or those pesky old people living high on the pension hog or those freeloaders sucking up Medicaid, our budgets are not constitutionally, contractually, or federally protected. This is compounded by the fact we seem to be everybody’s second priority. Democrats tell us they love us and they’re going to give us the funding we need just as soon as they raise taxes. Republicans tell us they love us and they’re going to give us the funding we need just as soon as they cut all those social services. In a state where unconstitutional initiatives keep majority Democrats from governing with a majority and where a critical mass of Democrats often act like Republicans, this kind of love triangle can leave college folk twisting themselves into knots trying to be all things to all people. University presidents tend to feel like they’ve navigated the legislative Scylla and Charybdis just right when Republicans think they’re Democrats who lean right and Democrats think they’re Republicans who lean left.

But now the jig is up.

If our public universities are going to remain public, if the middle classes and below are going to continue to have the opportunities that come with a genuine college education, if the state is going to continue to have the economic development and social stability that comes from strong universities, then this state must raise more revenue. With nothing but dark economic clouds on the horizon, we can no longer continue to try to walk a political tightrope, thinking that if we don’t do anything to piss off anybody, then maybe somebody will give us some money.

It is time for us to get off the fence and make full-throated arguments for tax reform and new revenue, including but not limited to the following:

--Even if public universities weren’t going to benefit from increased revenue, it’s high time Washington’s tax policy joined at least the late twentieth century. We have the most regressive tax system in the country.

--When some Democratic legislators say that they are unwilling to kill people so other people can go to college, they have a point. Capitalist economies without social safety nets should only exist in Dickens novels. The state budget has been so bad for so long that higher ed folks have started eying K-12 and social services as competitors for scraps and that’s a sure sign that we’re losing our way. We’ve taken to making the morally dubious argument that a dollar invested in higher ed makes more long term sense than a dollar invested in children’s health care or food for poor people. It’s time for us to stop that and start telling people that there should be two dollars.

--Public sector jobs are still jobs. The demonization of public employees has been so relentless that you’d think they were just a bunch of thieves stealing our tax money. Actually, they’re cops, firefighters, teachers and other hard working professionals, thousands of whom have been laid off. This not only erodes the public infrastructure to dangerous levels, it also drives the unemployment rate up, because . . .

…most of those private sector jobs ain’t coming back, taxes or no taxes. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have kept tax burdens on the well off unconscionably low in the hopes of spurring job creation. That hasn’t happened, because a variety of factors (mostly technology) have made it possible for companies to downsize and maintain or increase productivity. Insisting that rich people and corporations pay their fair share of taxes won’t kill jobs and isn’t class warfare, because...

…to quote Elizabeth Warren, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

--Taxes don’t drive away business. Study after study, leaked internal memo after leaked internal memo have shown that taxes are not near the top of the list in corporate calculations about where to do business. Boeing is much more likely to leave because our public universities aren’t graduating enough engineers than they are because taxes went up a little bit to pay for those engineers.

Here at the blog, we have often had the opportunity to share a beverage and conversation with revenue averse legislators, and we can say with sincerity that they are not like their comrades in the other Washington. For the most part, they are decent, thoughtful, and well-meaning people who are not simply trying to score political points. However committed they may be to smaller government and lower taxes, they aren’t likely to toss the university baby out with the tax bathwater just because we disagree about how to solve the budget crisis.

So it’s time for everybody in Washington’s public university community to get off the fence. We need to say as loudly and as forcefully as we can that enough is enough. We cannot just continue to cut. We need more revenue. 

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