Cheapskate Society

My son’s Thursday folder from school contained the usual announcements as well as the usual request for money; my daughter’s Thursday folder, from a different school, implored parents to buy $25 per person tickets for an upcoming silent auction, the purpose of which is to raise money for the school.

It’s a rare week that passes without a plea for money, pencils, paper, tissue, paper towels or art supplies from our public schools. Along with mastering the state-directed curriculum, standardized testing, Federal, state and local funding requirements and restrictions, the latest pedagogical techniques, school principals must also master Fundraising 101. Average fundraisers get the basics; extraordinary fundraisers get new science wings, computers, digital projectors and other high-tech gadgetry, out-of-town field trips, guest speakers and so on.

The State of California spends in the neighborhood of forty percent of its budget on K-12 education, or roughly $60 billion, and it’s nowhere near enough. You’d think that public schools in posh areas like Santa Barbara would be awash in cash from property taxes, but it’s not the case. Instead, the public schools hold bake sales and rummage sales, jog-a-thons, silent auctions, Bingo nights, on and on endlessly throughout the year.

What’s going on here? Is this the logical legacy of Proposition 13, the 1978 voter referendum that slapped a one percent cap on property taxes and effectively cut revenues for local governments and schools? Or is this part and parcel of the Reagan Revolution, which, coming hard on the heels of Prop 13 and Jimmy Carter’s impotent reign, declared government the problem and the marketplace the solution? Reagan believed that no government entity (including public education) could function as efficiently as a private, for-profit one. In Reagan parlance: government robbed and the market liberated.

It was an effective narrative and Reagan was an unparalleled messenger. With a prepared script and a patriotic, American Pie backdrop, Ronald Reagan recited his lines better than any American president before or since. The public bought Reagan’s message and government at every level began to wither. The Conservative assault on the middle-class, and the upward transfer of wealth, had begun. The American Left and the Left leaning wing of the Democratic Party was bereft of ideas and could come up with no narrative to defend its values against the onslaught. Economic justice, civil rights, equal opportunity for all – down the toilet. It was Morning in America. The Dems offered Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis and watched them get crushed. It was an age of corporate efficiency, massive downsizing, tax cuts for Big Business, Small Business, and the Wealthy; personal greed was canonized and shared sacrifice was ridiculed. The individual, mythic American, left to his own drive and initiative, unfettered by government interference and regulation, beholden to no one but himself, became King. Government, with its power to equalize and balance, was shoved out of the way, knocked to the turf, trampled. Reagan and his acolytes made it clear that they meant to eradicate every last vestige of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society; they knew it would take time, a few decades at least, but they organized for the long haul.

And make no mistake, the Conservatives organized the game brilliantly, culminating in the reign of Bush II, where for a time the GOP controlled all three branches of government. Meanwhile, thanks in large part to the “marketplace” genie that Reagan let out of the bottle, and with a big assist from the corporate-controlled Congress, the GOP’s supporters and allies had taken ownership of the mainstream mass media, which enabled the Conservative side of the GOP to shape and promote its message, stifle inquiry, and ignore inconvenient subjects such as the growing divide between wealthy and poor, the demise of the middle-class, environmental degradation, and the millions of citizens without access to affordable health care.

Connect the dots. Reagan declared government bad and the market good. The surest way to make government institutions inefficient, ineffective and irrelevant is to take away their funding by slashing taxes. And once you get started, why stop? Why not “starve the beast,” as conservative icon Grover Norquist famously remarked, until it croaks? Pour billions into national and homeland (wasn’t the term “homeland” frequently used in Nazi Germany?) security and let the rest ride. And even as tax rates are being cut, continue the media drumbeat for more tax “reform.”

Since Reagan, politicians of every stripe know that the surest way to commit political hari-kari is to call for new or increased taxes. Give the Conservative movement credit for taking that option off the table, making it completely taboo.

But we still have government and citizens (even wealthy ones) who need government services, like fire and police protection, courts, roads, bridges, highways, schools, and so on. How do we pay for our common needs when for nearly thirty years we’ve been conditioned to believe that we have no common needs and that taxation is theft? Sleight of hand accounting gimmicks, state-sanctioned gambling, pension fund raids, user fees – anything without resorting to the most direct and efficient solution -- raising taxes to invest in the programs and services society needs to remain decent and humane.

Perhaps the tide is turning. Perhaps it’s beginning to dawn on citizens that we’ve been bamboozled, played for fools by Conservatives and their policies. The wealthy can only isolate themselves from the great unwashed to a degree, but the wealthy must still move through society, drive the roads and highways, drink the water, breathe the air.

Until we come to our senses and rewrite the rules of the dead-end game we’re playing, my children will continue to come home from school with pleas for money, crayons, paper, and almost everything else students need to receive a basic American education.