Georgia’s leadership steadfastly refuses to allow more than 600,000 of our lower-income citizens to sign up for health insurance through Medicaid, an expansion that could rescue badly stressed rural and urban health-care systems and — according to a study at Georgia State University — create some 70,000 new jobs.
More importantly, it would also save human lives. But according to Gov. Nathan Deal, Georgia just can’t afford it, even though the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost for the first three years, tapering down permanently to 90 percent in later years.
Georgia is also bowing out of Common Core testing that would tell us exactly how our K-12 students and schools rank compared to their counterparts elsewhere. While that’s information that some might not want us to learn, again, we’re told that the reason is cost. We just can’t swing the required $27 million.
More fundamentally, we also can’t afford to keep our students in school for the minimum of 180 days a year nor pay our teachers for a full year’s work. With significant, repeated cutbacks in state education aid, even prosperous districts such as Cobb County are facing daunting operational deficits.
In fact, the situation is so bad that the Cobb County school board, dominated by Republicans, is floating the idea of a change to the state constitution that would allow school districts to make up for state cutbacks through a local sales tax. There’s no chance whatsoever of the idea becoming law, but it’s telling nonetheless as a sign of just how desperate local officials have become.
Ah, but the situation is never so dire that we can’t afford to cut taxes. With the 2014 General Assembly less than three months away, and with an important election year looming, Deal has asked a 21-member Georgia Competitiveness Initiative to recommend and vet business-friendly tax cuts for Georgia. The makeup of the committee — all 21 members are business executives whose industries would benefit by such tax cuts — pretty much dictates what its findings will be.
Almost four years ago, I noted that Georgia and Oregon were setting up an experiment of sorts by taking two different approaches in the teeth of a bad recession. The two states had similar per capita tax burdens and similar unemployment rates, but while Oregon voters had just approved significant tax increases to keep teachers in the classroom and cops on the beat, Georgia was pursuing tax cuts.
As Georgia state Rep. Tom Graves bragged at the time, “We’re going to be the economic beacon and leader for the rest of the country” thanks to those lower taxes. (Now a U.S. congressman, Graves was one of the leading figures in the GOP drive to shut down the federal government.)
The results: At the time, Oregon had an unemployment rate of 11 percent, considerably higher than Georgia’s 10.4 percent rate. Today, four years after raising taxes, Oregon’s unemployment rate has fallen to 8.1 percent, which is considerably lower than Georgia at 8.7 percent.
While such numbers don’t tell us anything definitive, they do indicate how simplistic the “cut taxes to create economic Nirvana” argument has become. For the past 10 years, we have been obsessed with being “business-friendly” while investing less and less in making Georgia a better place to live, with smarter students and healthier citizens and shorter commute times and a cleaner environment. And for 10 years we’ve been losing ground.
So hey, might as well make it 11.
