Arizona's Sophie's Choice: Prop 123

Rss@dailykos.com (mother Mags) · Thursday, April 21, 2016, 10:34 pm

Sure, we want good schools, and we want to preserve Arizona’s majestic landscapes—not everyone, of course, but that statement would poll pretty high. Still, in the last decade the Republican majority in the legislature has sliced K-12 and higher ed more than any other state, the lowest spending per pupil in the nation. The results are sobering: always 49th or worse in every significant category. Hey, where’s that Knowledge Economy?

More money for education always polls high, because most Arizonans know what’s happened in their districts—huge class sizes, no books, crumbling buildings, teachers leaving. But our education leaders at the legislature have more important things to do than advocate for schools. See, we need more god in the classroom, the heck with well-paid teachers. And let’s get rid of ethnic studies, just because. Maybe church attendance should be mandatory, pondered the Senate chair of education.

Here’s how fucked up it is: A sales tax that voters passed in 2000 to support education was virtually ignored by the legislature, which used the added revenue for its own purposes, like making up for budget cuts. So the schools sued the state and in 2010 the courts ruled that the legislature illegally withheld up to $1.6 billion from the education budget, covering years of tea-bagger bullshit abuse. The ruling also ordered the state to repay the schools $317 million immediately. The case is on appeal because Republicans, starting at the top with Gov. Ducey, don’t want to give the schools what the voters intended but the wingnuts stole.

Rather than do what they should do—repay the schools and use the state’s current budget surplus to get us back on track—the boneheads appealed the ruling and substituted a plan to increase education funding and piss all over the environment at the same time. A twofer!

Ducey and his flunkies say there’s no money for education, which is BS. The state’s running a surplus, built partly on the backs of underfunded schools. Also, legislators could (but they won’t) restore a smidgeon of the corporate taxes they reduced substantially (from 7 to 4.9 percent), which has resulted in an estimated revenue loss of $530 million by 2019. The business-friendly tax cutters said the lower rate would attract more companies and grow state revenue—the old trickle-down crap—but corporate tax revenues are way down and we haven’t seen any big national headquarters or major employers relocate here, unless minimum-wage call centers and Walmarts count.

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