School sales tax an untimely idea
By:
Monday, November 03, 2008
The Champaign school district reports it's flush with cash, but means to use it to give outsized raises to its teachers, boost administrator's salaries and dump half a million in legal fees to sustain that brainless consent decree that has almost wrecked the system (a simple motion to rescind and dismiss would cost about $5,000, and I would do it for free). Yet for all that operating cash flow, the district's chief financial officer says there are insufficient resources for "capital needs (that) are just too great."
Most readers know where the local economy is headed, that unemployment is going up and average family incomes are going down. The notion of a 13.5 percent guaranteed three-year bump in base salary, with commensurate medical and retirement benefits, is delusional for almost everybody – everybody, that is, who can't shift the capital cost of housing off the family budget. Private citizens can't do that; only public taxing bodies can try that trick.
I have been practicing tax law and studying various tax policies as a hobby for more than 25 years. Sales taxes are the least progressive and least publicly responsive of any form of tax. Sales taxes most burden those who can least afford them, are almost never lowered (especially when tied to indefinite bond authority) and in this instance will delay any real reform in local public school finance discipline.
To my eye, voting in an additional 1 percent sales tax at this time, under these circumstances, would be a bad move.
BILL PEITHMANN
Mahomet