Last updated on 2014.05.19
According to a new Dakota Poll, 73% of South Dakota registered voters who identify themselves as "Tea Party supporters" say they would support an extra-penny summer sales tax (essentially Senator Stan Adelstein's temporary tourism tax, SB 174) to balance the state budget.
Mr. Ehrisman points to other results of the poll and concludes the "Tea Party" is just a whacky bunch of misfits. Some DWC commenters stick their heads in their sandy ignorance and concentrate on insulting Don Frankenfeld, Sam Hurst, and the other reasonably intelligent men behind Dakota Poll without offering any actual numbers to counter the poll's findings. (If you have any questions about methodology, Dakota Poll is pretty transparent, offering its questionnaire with top line results and crosstabs online.)
Now my headline could be "South Dakota Tea Party Backs Tax Hikes." My friends at The Independent Local go with that line. I get lazy with the term "Tea Party," but I am willing to maintain that the term is inapt. There is no such "party." It has no candidates, no seats in the Legislature. Even their darling Congresswoman Kristi Noem, coyly declines to identify herself as part of the amorphous movement. The term "Tea Party" remains convenient shorthand for a movement, part astroturf and media manipulation, part middle-class anxiety over complicated problems and a fading modus vivendi, with lots of legs and arms and lungs but no head. (Sounds like a bad transporter malfunction!)
Whether we call them Tea Partiers or not, here's the headline that matters: Hurst and friends talked to 400 people who call themselves conservatives. They love Kristi Noem, John Thune, and Kristi Noem, in that order. They mostly hate Tim Johnson. 63% of them believe "the Second Amendment gives private groups the right to form militias to hold government accountable." But given a choice between raising the summer sales tax or cutting aid to schools and nursing homes, even these rootin'-tootin' conservatives say, "I'll pay more taxes."
That tells me that when Senator Russell Olson says voters "don't want their taxes increased for any programs," he's listening to echoes in his head, not the voice of the even the conservatives he thinks he represents.
Russ also isn't reading Patty's poll. On Rep. Stricherz's legislative blog poll, 89% of respondents have said they support an extra-penny tax to balance the budget.
Those results fit Hurst et al.'s to a Tea.
This rings true with the other conservatives in my neighborhood, anecdotal as my straw poll is.
There's some legitimate concern, though, about the relative proportions of spending within education. I suspect South Dakota shares a simililar inequal distribution of benefits as Kansas:
http://www.kansasliberty.com/liberty-update-archive/2009/12jan/administrators-not-teachers-reap-rewards-of-increased-school-spending/
All right people lets get on this, go here and email your legislator. Heck email all of them. Let them know everyone is up for different ideas and plans even taxes, but the Governors 10% cut is deplorable. A non starter to the people of South Dakota!
Addendum:
2009 Bureau of Labor Statistics:
SD is 48th in education administrator pay ($65,590 with W.VA at $60,760
SD is 51st in Elementary Educator Pay ($38,350)
SD is 49th in Middle School Pay ($39,340)
SD is 51st in High School Educator Pay ($38,070)
So while there's a disparity (we're not dead last in everything), the disparity doesn't seem to be as great as imagined, especially since West Virginia is such a zinger, paying $4,000 less per administrator than any other state. The same $4k would bump us into mid to low 40s in rank for educator pay.
Any chance Cory that people would take a look at the BEEF proposal that I have on the table? It would be more broad in funding, totally dedicated to education, provides property tax relief, and requires the participation of all SD residents-young and old, poor or rich, to fund education.
Proofiness.
Seventy-three percent of tea-party sympathizers indicated that they'd rather see the summer sales tax than see a 10-percent cut to education and nursing homes.
If balancing the budget were logically equivalent to cutting funds to education and nursing homes by 10 percent, then the statement "73% of South Dakota registered voters who identify themselves as 'Tea Party supporters' say they would support an extra-penny summer sales tax (essentially Senator Stan Adelstein’s temporary tourism tax, SB 174) to balance the state budget" would reflect the results of the poll.
But the of course, we can balance the budget without cutting education or nursing homes and (more likely) we can cut education and nursing homes without balancing the budget.
Proofiness! (Check it out on amazon dot com.)
Not so proofy as you might think, Stan! The Governor is providing those exact cuts as the means to balance the budget. Senator Adelstein is proposing this specific tax plan to avoid those cuts. The choice falls far short of exhausting all possible options you and I might come up with (like hammering TransCanada with a 50-cent-per-barrel tax), but the choice does validly reflect the options offered by our leaders.
Wayne, I need to dig through my numbers, but I think our nation's lowest teachers salaries are a quantum jump below #50, just like the WV admin example you cite. We're not just last, we're really last.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_sd.htm
I didn't go exhaustive - I just picked the three big parts of primary & secondary education (Elementary, Middle & Highschool Educators). I haven't a clue if special education teachers throw our numbers off, but the bottom of the pack tends to be pretty tightly clustered.
Granted, an educator's pay is still low here, but it's considerably above the mean annual wage of the state ($33,320).
Or am I missing something?
Apples to apples: comparing the wage earned by a college-educated professional to the overall average earned by all groups, including low-paying restaurant/tourism work, paints an unfair picture. Focus on the earning potential a teacher has here versus anywhere else, and you see a serious recruitment/retention problem.
Besides, deflated wages for everyone don't justify deflated wages for anyone.
Wayne...your statement "Granted, an educator’s pay is still low here, but it’s considerably above the mean annual wage of the state ($33,320)."
How depressing. Kind of like saying "sure your wages suck in comparison to the states we compete with, but hey the good news is that everyone elses sucks worse!"
What concerns me more is that there are people who actually think that this is a good thing.
I bet if Noem were in Pierre still she would be opposed to it because she would be against a 1 penny tax but be in favor of Millions of federal stimulus.
No minds will be changed in Pierre unless someone presents them with the evidence and then asks the to comment on the record. It gets a little harder for them when they have to acknowledge that their constituents might think a little different than what they are trying to do in Pierre.
Matter of fact, a good idea would be to present the different polls and then email or write your legislators so they can put their opinion on the record.
I can see the email now: Dear citizen, Thanks for your interest in the Republican party. While it may just seem that most South Dakotans would prefer we took a different alternative than hacking schools and old people...we know what's best for everyone and if I were to vote for any tax I could lose my membership in a lot of really cool Republican cults.
It would probably be best if you just sat back and let us handle things the way we want to without all this public input.
Jana & Cory,
I don't disagree. But it's not as though we can tax our way to teachers' salaries which are in high competition with other states without severe consequences to the populace- we just don't have the economic means to do so. That's where the mean wage comes into play - it should serve as a reminder that we have a lot of challenges to face, and considerations to keep in mind.
It's one of the reasons Madison Central voters nixed the $17 million bond issue. Between that and the probable need to opt-out, that's a lot of folks who're going to get squeezed more to keep things at Status Quo, or try for improvements.
Budget cuts will eliminate jobs, and that will ripple out. Tax raises will squeeze out jobs, too.
But I'm willing to risk a little more in taxes to prevent us from lagging further behind. Then again, with the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of government/public jobs threatened by all the states' threats of austerity measures (look to our neighbors to the east, New York, Illinois, etc.), if we can keep ourselves steady, we may actually come out ahead.
And that's perfectly reasonable, Wayne. You make a good point that our low-wage economy leaves us with fewer resources per capita to devote toward the general welfare.
But that wealth is growing. Our GDP hasn't dipped yet during the recession. There was more income overall in South Dakota last year than the year before, which tells me our taxes and revenue for schools ought not need to be cut, if we could just capture that growing wealth in our tax structure.
Of course, the tax hike that even the conservatives discussed above are supporting isn't a get-rich-quick plan for teachers. We'll still be 51st for teacher pay. We're just talking about not having to fire 10% of Madison Central's staff or not having to ask every teacher to take a $4000 pay cut... which by 2009 data, would put us more than $10,000 behind the next lowest average teacher salary in the nation (that's in North Dakota... yup! I found the blog post I was thinking of).
Wayne, if we continue to think that winning is balancing the budget by cutting quality of life...well then we all may be looking at a different game than the one they are playing in Pierre.
Cory:
I stand by my proofiness position.
"Not so proofy as you might think, Stan! The Governor is providing those exact cuts [education, nursing homes] as the means to balance the budget ..."
Not only those cuts, Cory, but cuts to everything across the board, as I understand it.
"... Senator Adelstein is proposing this specific tax plan to avoid those cuts."
Yes, Cory, to avoid those specific cuts [education, nursing homes.]
Change the meaning of "those" as we go along, and we can make an elephant into a grizzly bear, or a rhinoceros into a hippopotamus.
That said, I understand that elephants, grizzlies, rhinos and hippos will all cause problems in any living room.
I spoke with a neighbor yesterday. She says we ought to do the cuts on a case-by-case basis. Some things we can cut. Some things we can't.
Of course, we could do what some people here in Lead want to do, and get more revenue by opening nude dancing joints in every bloody town of over 1,000 people. (Both my neighbor and myself oppose the proposed nude dancing joint and plan to vote against it in an upcoming city-wide referendum.)
I do not necessarily oppose Stan Adelstein's plan, but I'd rather see the sales tax go up year round, and have groceries exempted. Maybe that idea can go to a statewide referendum. I suspect that it would pass -- either my plan or Adelstein's. Not necessarily by 73-to-27 percent, but it would pass.
Once we get the budget balanced, if we can do it, then we can try to come up with realistic solutions to problems such as low wages and, in particular, low teacher salaries which are a real black eye for us. I doubt we can force ourselves upscale by taxation, however. If you take more of the people's money from them, I suspect they'll more likely end up poorer, not richer, unless that tax money buys something mighty good.
Would this work? We tax the farm subsidies that South Dakota legislators get from our federal tax dollars...just guessing that's not a small number.
How about taxing the double dipping farmers on the subsidies to grow corn plus the subsidies on the production of Ethanol.
Lot of hate for farmers... I guess you're entitled to your opinions, but taxing subsidies doesn't sound that productive... kinda like taxing someone's welfare check.
If you don't want subsidies to keep food cheap, that's one thing... but to tax the benefits doled out... kinda silly... especially when you look at where agriculture in other regions gets quite a bit more than we do.
That, and I like subsidies such as Conservation Reserve Programs... allows our state to benefit by the big hunter tourism, and allows me to put food on my table too.
Some info to chew on:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/statefacts/sd.htm
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FarmIncome/govtpaybyfarmtype.htm
Sam Hurst not dead:
http://twitter.yfrog.com/obq5qmlj