Spending Limit Silliness

AFTie Ed has been posting extensively on the issue of state Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiatives. He thinks they're bad for education, and he's absolutely right.

TABOR provisions--often implemented via ballot iniative or constitutional amendment--limit annual state spending growth to a fixed percentage, typically tied to the inflation rate and sometimes a measure of population growth. State spending typically increases at higher rate, usually in line with the overall growth in the economy. If the economy grows by 5%, for example, 1% might be due to population growth, 2% to inflation, and 2% to increases in economic productivity. TABOR provisions essentially deny the public the right to invest the fruits of productivity growth in public services, including schools. Thus, public employees--like teachers--whose work contributes to economic growth don't share in those rewards.

In addition to being simplistic and mechanistic, TABOR provisions are also intensely undemocratic. They amount to the citizens of today denying the citizens of the future the chance to have different opinions about how much public spending is desirable (unless that amount happens to be less than spending today).

Ed's advocacy on this issue also emphasizes a point that sometimes gets lost in the various internecine education policy disputes around unions and collective bargaining: while unions may be wrong on some of the issues within education policy, they're on the right side of many of the most important issues outside of education policy, this being just one example. There are plenty of people out there who couldn't care less about the intracies of seniority-based transfer rules or merit pay, they just want to cut school spending and use the money to fund tax cuts for big corporations and rich people. That those policies should be opposed we can all agree.