Screw State Universities

How Republicans Chose Tax Cuts over Education  by Ed Kilgore- TPM. 

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Scott Walker- Wisconsin 

The last time we had anything like the recent wave of Republican takeovers of state governments was in 1994, when the GOP picked up ten net governorships and took control of fifteen new state legislative chambers. The officeholders who benefited from this shift were for the most part very lucky people, assuming their positions just as the Long Boom of the mid-to-late 1990s began to gain momentum. The resulting revenue bonanza made it easy for Republicans at the state level to keep tax cut promises without unpopular spending reductions. Remember that large group of GOP governors who backed George W. Bush when he ran for president in 2000 as a “reformer with results?” They all, including Bush, owed a big debt of thanks to the drivers of the national economy, including Bill Clinton.

But the current batch of GOP landslide beneficiaries in the states are not quite so lucky, at least so far. While the economy has slowly picked up pace since the first cohort of them took office in 2011, it’s hardly roaring. And it’s not clear who’s in a worse position: veteran Republicans in budget trouble because of tax cuts already passed, or the 2015 freshmen who took office promising tax cuts they have no way to pay for without deep budget cuts. An additional complication is the revenue crisis facing states—most of them governed by Republicans—depending disproportionately on oil and gas severance taxes, which have been decimated by the recent fall in world oil prices.
Some high-profile Republican governors and legislative leaders are in a particularly deep hole of their own making, and are taking on the state version of the political “third rail” by attacking higher education spending.
There are plenty of reasons why higher ed is an unusually tough place to cut, varying from the power of alumni to football and basketball and the perceived economic payoff of a good state university system. Still, during the depths of the Great Recession, virtually all states cut higher ed subsidies, which non-coincidentally produced a large wave of tuition increases. But some cut more than others, and are doing less to replace lost funding now that the economy’s doing better. Only eight states failed to increase per student higher ed spending in Fiscal Year 2014: Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, West Virginia and Wyoming. And now in 2015 it generates headlines when significant higher education cuts are proposed, as in Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Louisiana.
You may note that these are all states with highly ideological Republican state administrations and legislatures. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback narrowly survived a reelection challenge focused on his credit-damaging tax cuts and unpopular education cuts; now, with little to lose, he’s back for more. In North Carolina, a state often matched with Kansas as a deliberate conservative policy experiment station, state legislators (guided by a conservative think tank founded by highly influential billionaire Art Pope) are seeking shutdowns in ideologically unfavored parts of the university system.

The U.S. remains in the Great Recession

The U.S. and California are in a recession- a long recession.   Some communities are in a Depression.  Poorly informed  or uniformed writers and talking heads in the media contest- we can not decide if we are entering a new recession.  They arrive at this strange question because they are looking at profits and corporations.

For working people the Great Recession continues.  It is the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

In July the unemployment rate for persons who did not graduate from  high school was %15. For high school graduates it was 9.3%.  For persons with a Bachelor’s degree or higher it was 4.3.

In July   unemployment in the Black community stood at 15.9 %.  For the nation as a whole, unemployment was virtually unchanged at 9.1% in the month of July. Among whites, unemployment was 8.1%; among Latinos, unemployment was 11.3 %.

What are the consequences?  See the above  video by National Nurses United.  


We must fight back.