EDITORIALS
Taxpayers need relief
State teachers union uses muscle to protect system with poor results
Updated: 08/23/08 6:57 AM
See if this doesn’t make you fume. The primary interest group fighting hardest against a state property tax cap is the state’s big teachers union, whose members benefit from higher taxes while making almost $10,000 more than the median household income. Sweet.
It’s worse in Buffalo, where the average teacher is paid $47,422, and the median household income lags at $27,850.
New York State United Teachers can dress this up any way it wants, but this is not about education, it’s about power and money. It is doing its best to bully state legislators into opposing a property tax cap, whose imposition would crimp its members’ income growth.
Teacher salaries in this state are 17 percent higher than the national average and school expenses — 71 percent of which are tied to personnel — rose at a compound annual growth rate of 7.9 percent over the last six years. From the 2006 to 2007 school years, the most recent data compilation, 70 percent of the state’s school districts saw pupil enrollment decline or stagnate, continuing a long trend. Meanwhile, tax levy growth outside New York City has grown 45 percent since 2000. That simply is not sustainable.
Property taxes are killing the state’s economy, and most property taxes — 62 percent of them — support the state’s public schools. In that regard, it’s no surprise NYSUT opposes a tax cap; indeed, it would be startling if it didn’t. But it’s more than a little ironic that one of the union’s primary support groups, the Working Families Party, is coming out against a tax cap that the state’s working families desperately need.
But it’s not just that the teachers are defending some of the highest property taxes in the country. It’s that they’re arguing that they are necessary to protect education in a state where education is a dysfunctional mess.
New York’s per-pupil spending is the highest in the nation — $14,119 in 2007 — yet only 69 percent of students who started high school in 2003 graduated last year. In New York City the rate was even worse, with just 52 percent graduating, and Buffalo’s rate was 46 percent. The teachers union and its allied organizations may feel the need to protect that record, but ordinary taxpayers don’t have to, and state lawmakers shouldn’t.
State officials are supposed to be in the business of ensuring that taxpayers get the most for their dollars. Instead, legislators are too often in the pockets of wealthy special interests — in this case, the teachers union — whose demands contradict those of the state’s suffering taxpayers.
This is the moment that taxpayers need to speak up. Lawmakers are looking for votes in September’s primary elections and November’s general election.
New York cannot simply keep doing the same thing. The price, measured in lost jobs and shrinking population, is simply too high. Anyone who wants to can draw a straight line from the state’s high property taxes to its waning clout in Congress, where power is a function of population.
The property tax cap proposed by Gov. David A. Paterson may be a blunt instrument, but it provides a reasoned approach to a real and serious problem. Lawmakers need to be made to understand that.
