Following on my earlier post, Dems-n-Energy, I bring you another fake concern of the left that could be addressed, at least in part and almost immediately, if the Dems tried this one easy thing. In Dems-n-energy, it was the price of energy. Here, we’re talking education costs, which are the single greatest driver of high property taxes.
After state and federal dollars, about 63% of your property tax bill in New Hampshire is education funding. Without wading into the parallel issues of declining enrollment, rising costs, and miserable outputs (declining value), special ed costs make up a huge chunk of the 63%, with administrative overhead equally high and burdensome.
In other words, you don’t need more, new, or Rube Goldbergian gymnastics to begin to solve the problem. One that is mostly local and which requires voters to show up and vote for fewer of the things that cost more and deliver less. The state can’t do much without robbing parents and taxpayers of local control. But it could pressure our members of Congress to meet the Federal Government’s obligation.
The mainstreaming of special needs students is a federal mandate, but instead of paying the promised 40% of costs, it pays about 7%. You can’t whine about high property taxes without first pointing to and resolving the problem. If the Feds paid the other 33%, you could lower the cost of schools by that amount and property taxes with it.
Have any Democrat at the state level tried to get our Democrats at the Federal level to pay what the law requires?
How do they manage to bitch about down streaming costs at the state level when they haven’t done enough to prevent it at the federal level, which is where the mainstreaming mandate that drove up costs originates?
Ask them often whenever it comes up. First, how do you increase education spending and lower the tax burden? New Hampshire has one of the lowest total tax burdens in the nation, despite the high property taxes. What you propose sounds like a song and dance that will result in an increased total tax burden to pay for a failed education model.
Second, if you really wanted to lower property taxes, you’d sue the feds for the other 33% they owe us annually for special ed and not use it as an excuse to increase school budgets. Why won’t you do the first, and why would we trust you not to do the second?
Finally, since it matters, you could ask them, what’s the plan when the Courts realize the State Constitution does not allow for state or local taxpayer funding of public education? Don’t worry about that just yet. Stick to the other two. This will just distract them. As will the fact that local Democrat run bergs will increase spending to absorb any dollars freed up, regardless of where they originate.
