How State and Local Government Subsidies Hurt Public Education

Thanks to Goldy over at The Stranger Slog for the alert to the three-part series at the NY Times about the $80B a year in subsidies states give to businesses.  From his piece:

The Times has also included a handy little interactive database that allows you to explore these incentive programs state by state. For example, Washington State taxpayers spend $2.35 billion a year on incentive programs. That's roughly 15 cents per state budget dollar, or $349 for every man, woman, and child in the state. Imagine how different our education funding debate might look if our state had an extra $2.35 billion a year to spend on schools?

As Hallmark CEO Donald J. Hall Jr., put it it about the budget-depleting subsidy border war between Kansas and Missouri: “If you’re looking at the competitiveness of a region, the most important thing a region can do is to focus on education. And this use of incentives is really transferring money from education to businesses.” (bold his)

It takes only a simple majority vote to grant a tax exemption or credit in Washington, but under current state law a two-thirds supermajority to repeal one, no matter how nonproductive. Not that we'd know if a subsidy was nonproductive. Every legislative effort to sunset exemptions or subject them to performance audits has been crushed in Olympia. So we're flying blind. And that's just plain stupid.