WILMINGTON – I’ve said it several times this week, in several different forums: fiscal conservatives are credible only to the extent that they are specific. One of the worst spectacles in politics is to see a politician thunder against tax increases and promise to protect or raise government spending, resorting to the old stand-by of “waste, fraud, and abuse” when asked how their numbers can add up.
Say what you want to about the alternative budget put together by my John Locke Foundation colleague Joe Coletti, but at least he can’t be accused of fuzzy ambiguity. There are dozens of specific, line-item recommendations to save money and return it to the North Carolina taxpayers who earned it. The total savings comes to about $1.4 billion in the second year of the biennium, which along with some redirection of revenue and elimination of targeted tax breaks allows Coletti to propose a general tax reduction, including a plan to pull the top individual and corporate income tax rates down to 6 percent.
One high-dollar proposal in the JLF alternative budget is to redirect more than $120 million in funds allocated for teacher assistants to higher-priority expenditures such as hiring classroom teachers to keep up with enrollment growth in the public schools. We’ve been recommending some version of this idea for many years, ever since we discovered that careful research had increasingly found that the presence of teacher assistants, particularly in grades above K-1, appear to have little measurable effect on student learning.
This should not be taken as a suggestion that teacher assistants don’t work hard, or that many teachers don’t appreciate their help. In a world of scarce resources, you have to make decisions on the margin about which expenditure of a given dollar is likely to provide the greatest return. Based on the available evidence, it would be better to expend that dollar hiring good-quality teachers, reducing class size in kindergarten (but probably not in higher grades), and providing more school choices for parents.
During a recent trip to the Wilmington area, I had occasion to read this piece on a proposed legislative reduction in teacher-assistant funding. Here’s a case where lawmakers in Raleigh are making the right decision (as did Gov. Mike Easley when he proposed savings in the same area in previous budgets) but are getting bad publicity. In Pender County, as the story relates, officials have decided to respond to potential changes in funding by requiring teacher assistants to perform other work, such as driving buses.
Sounds reasonable to me. It sounded reasonable to several business leaders and community activists I talked to in the region. And yet such a change would certainly disrupt the lives of longtime school employees.
Should that be the test of whether a public policy is adopted? No. Budget decisions are tough. They involve competing interests. It’s easy to see the effect of a funding change on a state employee who might lose her job. But it’s harder to identify the person who didn’t get a private-sector job because taxes went up, or who didn’t get a job on a road crew because state government used its scarce resources elsewhere.
That’s why we need leaders with the right general principles as well as a mastery of the specifics.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.