Some Arizonans are more equal than others
Posted by: Donna
One of the e-newsletters I get weekly that I really enjoy is Too Much, a publication dedicated to exposing the excesses of the super-wealthy and the ever widening chasm between the classes in our country. It’s great and y’all should sign up for it. When you click on the link, scroll down to the ‘In Focus’ section for their take on how the dire financial straits of Arizona and a bunch of other states has a lot to do with their high level of socio-economic inequality.
But the back story to the current state budget crisis, the worst since the 1930s, goes deeper than the still deepening Great Recession. The recession has indeed shoved states over the fiscal edge. But the recession didn’t bring states to that edge. Inequality did. The states with the biggest budget gaps just happen to be, for the most part, the states with the widest gaps between the rich and the rest.
They cite a year-old study by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget Policy Priorities that examined the dramatic gains the people at the top of the economic ladder and the declining fortunes of those in the middle and at the bottom. Needless to say, when most of the money is concentrated in the hands of a lucky few, they get to determine the direction of policy, while everyone else gets dragged into the slipstream.
With the economy’s rewards flowing to the top, and essentially the top alone, Americans in the middle have found their wages and salaries stagnating, even sinking. Tax cuts, for many in the middle, have come to seem the only way to make ends meet.
These tax cuts, once in place, start states on a nasty downward cycle. Tax cuts mean less state revenue. The lower the revenue, the fewer the dollars available for maintaining quality public services. The lower the quality, the greater the number of people who find themselves actively considering private service alternatives.
Soon the modestly affluent, not just the rich, feel better off going life on their own nickel — better off joining a private country club, better off sending kids to private school, better off living in a privately guarded gated development.
The greater the number of affluent people who forsake public services, the more inevitable still more service cutbacks become — even in “good” economic times, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute noted last year in Pulling Apart, a detailed look at state inequality.
“Wealthy families that can afford private schools for their children can lose sight of the need to support public schools,” that study observed. “As a result, support for the taxes necessary to finance government programs declines, even as the nation’s overall ability to pay taxes rises.”
I don’t necessarily agree with the Too Much folks that state tax cuts even seem to help the middle class make ends meet. The tax cuts the middle class enjoyed in AZ the past 20 years have been paltry, to say the least. I personally got a whopping $76 from the most recent income tax cut. Middle class Arizonans are facing both property and sales tax increases if the current version of the budget passes. And whatever aspirations the (formerly, in most cases) upwardly mobile had toward the education of their children, over 90% of Arizona parents have been sending their kids to their local public schools all along. They may want to send their kids to private schools, but they can’t. I already explained in my last post why the state constitution offers no protection against tax increases on the middle class, despite voters being duped into voting for something they were told would do that in 1992.
Hopefully the majority of the people in this state are going to get tired of being unequal.
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