Stop Taxing Schools With Underfunding

A new report released this week from the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California finds that some 75 percent of people receiving government assistance live in a household headed by a person who works.

But even with this assistance, families have other unseen costs. For example, a mother might need to commute a long distance to take her children to a clinic that accepts Medicaid and spend all day in the waiting area. Transportation, health-care co-pays and time are just some of the buried costs that poor families incur even when they’re getting help.

Plus, not only do taxpayers pay into the system that helps these families when moms and dads look for stable work or go to school, we taxpayers are also, in essence, writing checks to some of the nation’s largest corporations that use these low-wage workers to beef up their profit margins.

“This is a hidden cost of low-wage work,” Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Berkeley Center and a co-author of the report, told The New York Times of the study’s findings.

Of course, this argument is a non-starter here in Mississippi, where the stingy Republican-led Legislature does everything in its power to stymie programs designed to help the needy.

At the risk of paying lawmakers what they would perceive as a compliment, the Legislature is a lot like those publicly traded multinational companies. While the GOP leadership runs all over the state this election season hollering about fiscal restraint—in the way that corporate executives beat their chests about stock dividends at shareholder meetings—it’s important to point out the hidden cost of that so-called restraint, particularly on education.

Since the Legislature created the MAEP formula to provide the minimum amount of education funding, lawmakers have fully funded it just twice. Since the last time public education was fully funded, the compounded shortfall is creeping toward the $2 billion mark.

That sum is essentially a tax on school district and local taxpayers, which is ironic considering how badly legislative Republicans claimed to want to lower taxes this year. Because JPS’s budget comes from City of Jackson millage rates, local property taxpayers are ultimately on the hook if the district needs to increase its budget request due to insufficient funding.

Jacksonians cannot afford any more tax increases, nor can most Mississippians. There’s little we can do about it now that the session is over, but we encourage voters to question office seekers—newcomers and incumbents—who talk about tax relief and fiscal responsibility when it comes to education funding.

After all, even though lawmakers think they saved money on failing to fund MAEP, in the end, we’re all going to pay for that failure somehow.