Seattle councilmember Mike O’Brien has a solution to state budget cutting that is both brilliant and profoundly moral. He’s produced a nice 4 minute video, which you can watch here:
The premise of O’Brien’s argument is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with state budgets that impoverish early childhood education, but still fund multi-billion dollar roads projects. (Of course, in addition to early childhood education there are many other vital government services that are starved for funds in a way that roads just are not.)
Luckily, there’s a way to remedy the problem. If legislators scale back state highway-building ambitions, that will free up gas tax revenue that can be re-programmed to cities for local road projects. (The state constitution earmarks gas tax money for roads.) More funding from the state to pay for city roads would mean that cities would need to spend less of their general fund money on transportation — and that in turn would free up local general fund dollars to pay for early childhood education or other worthwhile programs that benefit people directly.
It’s an elegant, if partial, solution that can shore up some of Washington’s badly underfunded social services and education programs. The only real question before policymakers is whether it’s more important to invest in people or asphalt.
I’ve forwarded this on to friends and family. O’Brien’s quickly becoming one of my favorite local politicians.Of course we really need to just change the constitution (is that all?). I would think most people would prefer not to have their state value cars over every other function of government including education. It’s not like sales tax from pencils are bookmarked for schools, and liquor taxes aren’t constitutionally required to only go to alcohol treatment programs – why should gas taxes be so special?
I love this. Unfortunately, I can just hear businesses of all stripes yelling about how not improving roads will hurt them and thus cost the state jobs and revenues, and people lapping it up because it’s a simpler argument than: “educating people yields to better gains in the long run.”Still, it’s a dam good solution.