| How is this related to the property tax-cutting binge the GOP leadership is indulging? They cut property taxes last year. Now they want to cut them further. Cutting property taxes costs the state revenue. They can afford to lose the state revenue because they are no longer spending the money on critical state needs. Like public universities. Health care. Public schools.
In 2003 the Legislature deregulated tuition, letting universities raise the tuition tax without oversight from lawmakers. Universities raise their own money through higher tuition, and the state appropriates less general revenue to colleges. The state's savings is passed along to the rich in the form of property tax rate cuts. Rate cuts in property taxes disproportionately reward those who own more and more valuable property.
Thus, the tuition hikes are effectively a tax hike on the middle class. Wealthy families with a lot of property are getting big tax savings, more than enough to offset the tuition tax increases. Middle class families pay the tuition tax hike and get much less in property tax cuts. Not near enough to offset their losses to the tuition tax.
The House will likely vote on the windfall tax bill this coming week.
House Appropriations Committee mogul Warren "The Astronomer" Chisum's HB2 will strip $6 billion from the state treasury and send most of it to the state's biggest property owners. The leadership wants to take another $3 billion and set it aside for 2010-2011 cash payments to the wealthy.
According to the Texas College Coordinating Board, there are about 492,000 kids enrolled in Texas four-year universities. Each is paying about $2,200 more in tuition.
That's $1 billion a year taken from the middle class in the form of higher tuition costs. $4 billion for four years of college. $8 billion for your two oldest kids.
That's just about the cost of the four-year property tax cut for the rich proposed by the leadership. (The tax cut's much bigger, of course. We're only talking general revenue here. There's also the loophole-laced franchise tax on business which is dedicated to offsetting even deeper property tax cuts and almost doubles the wealthy's property tax windfall.)
We're $1 billion short. Higher tuition is not quite enough to reward the Republican contributor base. But we can steal some of the difference from kids kicked off CHIP.
State colleges, who in 2003 were given the ability to make up the loss of state funds with unregulated tuition hikes, are having to raise tuition because Craddick, Chisum and other know-nothings would rather send it to J.R. Ewing than to state universities, which, after all, teach such subversive things as the Copernican system.
The theft of middle class money by the wealthy is the official policy goal of Perry, Craddick, and Dewhurst. We'll pay tolls to drive on roads we've already paid for. Families who can't afford health insurance will agonize as the wealthy two-step in their private South Fork ballrooms.
This is an ugly, immoral picture, the kind of Gilded Age, robber-barron excess that historians, even conservative historians, will condemn as the impossibly selfish lunacy of a leadership generation bent on destroying opportunity for everyone but their own shrunken universe of wealthy friends. |
