2% Tax Levied on TUSD Teachers to Keep Schools Open

by David Safier

(TASL) OK, so the headline is a bit deceptive. Teachers aren’t really being asked to pay extra taxes. What’s happening is that teachers and the rest of the staff at Tucson schools will be getting no raises this year. I estimate it will cost about 2% more to live this year than last, which means they’re taking a 2% pay cut, which might as well be a 2% tax increase.

We’ve heard so often that Arizona is 49th in the nation in per-pupil spending that it hardly even registers anymore. This tax-and-spend liberal thinks it borders on the criminal that Arizonans won’t raise taxes to provide decent salaries for our teachers, adequate learning supplies for our children and well-maintained school buildings, all vital components of a quality education.

And it’s ignorance bordering on stupidity that 95% of us think there’s something wrong with raising taxes on the richest 5% of people and corporations who haven’t had it this good in a century. They’re rich. That means they have lots more money than any human being could possibly need. So they can pay higher taxes and still be rich. Let them keep the vast majority of their wealth, but make them pay a larger fraction of their incomes to keep our schools and other social services at a level that allows everyone in the state to have a reasonable chance to be safe, healthy and educated.

I find it both ironic and infuriating that we have the gall to expect teachers to take care of our children during the day and give them an education, and we reward them with a tax — or a pay cut if you like. It amounts to the same thing at the end of the month.

When schools are underfunded, both staff and students take a hit. Even if we forget about salaries for a moment, when school funding goes down, teachers are expected to teach more students with older textbooks in shoddily maintained buildings. It goes without saying that students get less personal attention and inferior educations when that happens.

When I was teaching in Portland, Oregon, and we went through our first round of serious school budget cuts in the 1980s, a teacher I worked with said, “We’re eating our seed corn.” You can’t say it any better than that.