Thursday, Jun. 12, 2008

Legislative mantra: Ignore your problems and hope they go away

AN ARTICLE published a few days before the Legislature adjourned for the year, projecting how things would turn out, listed three items under “what didn’t pass” this year: cigarette tax increase, payday lending restrictions and abolishing parole.

In one sense, it was a perfectly reasonable summation of the year. The way the Legislature and the lobbyists and other insiders judge things, those probably were the items that didn’t make it, the big talkers that will still be waiting for attention when the new Legislature convenes in January.

But important as they are, they are hardly the most important changes our state needed from the 2008 General Assembly. Those changes — to our school funding system, our tax system, the structure of our government, the ability of local communities to control their own governments without legislative interference — were never even seriously considered by the Legislature.

• More than three decades after the Legislature passed a law that was supposed to address the inequities borne of a property tax funding system, how well a child is educated still depends in large part on where he lives. Although the local tax base plays a smaller role than it used to, lawmakers have done nothing to make up for the fact that poor children who grow up and go to school around large concentrations of other poor children cost more to educate than middle-class children — or even poor children — who go to school with mostly middle-class children. We don’t take poverty into account when we divvy up money among the districts, which means wealthier districts get a relatively larger slice of the pie than they should if we ever hope to improve the education of the poor kids who drag down our averages — and our economy.

There’s one proven way to reduce the cost of educating poor kids: Give them a head start, with a high-quality 4-year-old kindergarten program. Amazingly, even though most legislators acknowledge that this is one of the smartest investments they can make, even though a state judge all but ordered them to provide it to poor children, the House refused even to consider the long-promised plan to make 4K available to at-risk children statewide; and neither the House nor the Senate considered providing the money to expand the current program.

• Our tax system is a muddled mess that has been added to and taken from at every whim, with each change causing a cascade of unintended effects. About the only clear thing you can say about it is that it forces the poor to pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the middle and upper classes, and it is beginning to rely too heavily on the sales tax, which is already 6 percent statewide. Since that’s the only tax we give local governments any flexibility with, it’s 8 percent and climbing in some counties, with an even higher tax on restaurant meals and convenience foods.

There’s no end to the problems with the system: We have the lowest cigarette tax in the nation. We encourage people to prop up petrodictators by charging one of the lowest gasoline taxes in the nation while also taxing only the first $5,000 of a car’s value, which means people who buy gas-guzzling Hummers pay a lower tax rate than people in subcompacts. We let the owners of prime beachfront property claim the agricultural tax exemption that drops property taxes down to pennies an acre, while inflating the price of rental housing by making the property owners pay taxes more than three times what homeowners pay.

It needs an overhaul, and again this year lawmakers made lovely speeches about that need. But we still don’t have one — only a promise to look into it. Again.

• Our government is needlessly and expensively redundant, and there are few clear chains of command. When things go wrong, you probably can’t blame the governor: He directly controls only about a third of the executive branch of government, and when he tries to exercise his control, the Legislature as often as not intervenes to stop him. You can blame the Legislature, but that doesn’t do a lot of good, since you get to pick only two of its 170 members, and they can convince you that they had nothing to do with the problem. The result is that we’re usually stuck with whatever problems somebody causes — all because the Legislature is afraid it won’t be as powerful if it gives the governor the control over management of the executive branch that 49 other governors take for granted.

House members took some baby steps toward turning power over to the governor this year, but no one ever seriously expected the Senate to do anything but ignore that legislation. And with the exception of one bill that came out of committee only to die on the Senate calendar because two senators opposed it, that is precisely what the Senate did.

• Voters elect their city and county council members, but legislators from the other side of the state tell those elected officials how to run their governments. The Legislature limits the type of taxes they can levy, limits the amount of taxes they can collect, tells them they can’t regulate billboards or make other zoning decisions that are unpopular with the special interests that fund legislators’ campaigns. Local legislators still run agencies in their home counties and dole out state dollars back home.

How bad is the situation? The anti-local-government sentiment in the State House has been so strong in recent years that lawmakers’ neglect this session might actually be worth celebrating — it means they didn’t make things any worse.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com.