Cutting Away at the Future

Cutting Away at the Future .......................................Dr. Michael Raucci

New York is one of the most populated states in the Union. It hosts the most influential financial market in the world, and is home to the United Nations. One would think it would be a bastion of forward minded, level headed thinkers. The current governor, Andrew Cuomo, comes from the Democratic Party, the political party that has long been the stalwart supporters of public education. Despite this, Mr. Cuomo has been using inflammatory rhetoric and a myopic vision of the future to promote his slash and burn agenda for education.

Clearly, New York State and most of the other states are dealing with serious fiscal crises that are the result of decades of abuse, pork, and special interest pandering. That, coupled with the current economic downturn and its subsequent reduction in state revenues has resulted in a perfect storm of budgetary chaos. Mr. Cuomo has been calling for further cuts in education on top of the cuts already instituted during Mr. Patterson’s reign. Local education budgets weren’t without their fat, but all of that and then some has already been cut from budgets over the past 2 years of lean state education funding.

Currently, the United States is ranked 18th out of the 36 industrialized nations in the world in education (http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/19/US_slipping_in_education_rankings/UPI-90221227104776/). Broken down, we are ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and a less than flattering 25th in mathematics (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/us-falls-in-world-education-rankings_n_793185.html). There are various manners of interpreting these statistics, but the glaring obviate, the so called ‘elephant in the room’ is that as America falls farther and farther behind in education now, there will be a price to pay later. In other words, our failure to improve education now will result in fewer jobs for Americans, less innovation by Americans, and an even more strapped tax revenue system than we currently have. Our future will be built by highly educated, creative, and resourceful individuals around the world. As Mr. Cuomo and politicians across the nation, gut education funding, they guarantee that fewer and fewer of those future innovators will be Americans. America is no longer a nation of industry. We can’t compete with the wages and manpower supplied by the likes of China and India. The United States has, over the past 50 years, changed its workforce into one of innovators and service providers. In essence, we deal in high level technology and high level intelligence, and until now that workforce has been fueled by an elite educational system. We cannot go back to being an industrial nation. It would mean a substantial reduction in living standards for the average person. According to author Michael LeGault, The United States currently has a high demand for engineers but not enough qualified individuals to fill the jobs. This has resulted in many retired engineers being solicited out of retirement in an effort to keep our technology based businesses operating. We must re-establish ourselves as the torch bearers of education, particularly in science and math, if the United States is going to retain those technology based jobs in the future. The alternative is that those jobs and those companies that supply them will emigrate to countries that have an appropriately educated workforce.

The solution to our diminished educational rankings and its associated bleak future for America does not lie in blind education spending cuts. It also does not involve scrapping the current system. The answer is in a reorganization of how schools operate, an assessment of how teachers are taught and implement their trade, a heightening of expectations from Kindergarten all the way through graduate school, and perhaps most importantly, a re-emergence of the family as the primary guiding and positive influence for the education of children.

Further blanket education cuts are a short-sighted solution to a fiscal crisis which will ultimately leave us in even more dire straits twenty years from now. We must look at the big picture. America is in trouble. Medicare is strapped and it’s not because doctors are making too much money off of it, social security is on the road to bankruptcy as the percentage growth of the old continues to outpace that of the young, the ranks of the unemployed have swelled, and Medicaid spending is outpacing its resources. Add to this that our national debt is over 14.7 trillion dollars and is rapidly approaching a level which would make it a greater percentage of our GDP than at any other time in our nation’s history. We have dug ourselves a hole by not anticipating the future. We need to get out of that hole but we need to do so with an eye on where we want to go.

Mr. Cuomo, your cuts may save you face now but they steal our future. Step back, look at the big picture. If you want to solve this state’s fiscal crisis, don’t do it on the backs of our children and at the expense of everyone’s future. You are playing a shell game with money and the losers are the middle and low income taxpayers and school-aged children. By reducing state aid, which comes from progressive taxation programs, you are shifting greater responsibility for shouldering the expenses of education onto local property taxpayers, a regressive taxation system. Despite the fact that most school budgets will reflect less spending, it means that local property taxes must go up in order to account for the funding that Albany is no longer owning up to. The public should not be fooled by Mr. Cuomo’s chicanery. His proposed tax cuts and spending reductions are a cleverly disguised rouse that shift the brunt of school funding to local property taxpayers. In so doing, Albany unjustifiably shifts the blame and public ire off of themselves and onto local schools.

The onus on elected officials is to make changes that matter, not changes that only appear to matter. If you want to implement changes that would really make a difference then start by restructuring the state’s property tax system. It is arcane and was created by a feudal society at a time when there were a relatively sparse number of land owners, most of whom were wealthy. It does not work in today’s world where the majority of New York land owners are middle or low income families, which is why we are constantly trying to implement ineffective correction factors like the equalization rate and the STARS program. Recent calls for a 2% tax cap or a circuit breaker system are proposals that are wrought with future problems and inequity. The only way to equitably fund schools is to redistribute wealth by either taxing consumption or income. If Albany is not up to that task, and granted it is a monumental one, at least relieve school districts from the unfunded mandates that tie their hands to provide costly programs and other expenditures before implementing Draconian cuts. Cutting first but leaving these mandates to be dealt with on another day is imprudent. I am suggesting that Mr. Cuomo and the legislator think before they leap. Analyze the impact of your actions for now and for the future. The hole you are jumping into may be deeper than you think.