Revenue roulette

When the politicians tell you they have given you something for nothing, they probably haven’t.

A pendulum has swung. Somebody is on the down side.

The Hutchinson administration, boasting of raising no new taxes, has reassigned some highway costs from highway users to all taxpayers. And in turn it has reassigned some college costs from all taxpayers to collegegoers and their families.

If it must be one way or the other, the choice seems reasonable enough, even fair.

—————— A poor man driving his clunker on the highways to get to a meager-wage job could use the break on his gasoline tax. For college-goers maintaining a reasonable rate of progress and a decent grade-point average, we at least have a lottery to provide scholarship aid.

There is no lottery buying gasoline for motorists maintaining good driving records.

Highways, while popular, don’t have adoring alumni to form private foundations to raise supplemental money to build portions of them.

And highways, while expensive, don’t maintain white-elephant athletic programs that, at too many colleges, erode the main budget at the expense of academics.

The recent activity in the special session protected the motoring public from additional gasoline taxes. But, since there is no money growing on trees, it essentially imposed a tuition and student-fee tax on attendees at public colleges.

The fact of the matter is that higher education has been held at flat funding levels in the state budget for years. So institutions have responded not only by steadily raising tuition, but by creating other fee-based means of getting into the pockets of kids and their parents. The latest development merely furthers the trend.

Ideally, a college education would not be as expensive as it is or beset by athletic drains on revenue, but, as Bernie Sanders proposes, free.

Any momentum for that notion seems confined to large and enthusiastic Sanders rallies. Hillary Clinton wants to help only by letting student debt-holders renegotiate their interest rates. Donald Trump … well, who knows?

Hutchinson’s highway program called for the state, for the first time, to get money for highways from someone other than direct highway users. It called for tapping general revenue, which is made up mostly of general sales and income taxes that have been reserved historically for general imperatives like schools, human services, prisons, public safety and, yes, colleges and universities.

Hutchinson’s program presumed to take tens of millions each year from the general revenue surplus, which consists of interest-earning tax collections in excess of general revenue appropriations over a year’s time.

The plan is disingenuous and a bit of a shell game. Surpluses vary in size according to economic performance and the frugality of appropriations. To call pre-emptively for spending on highways from the surplus is essentially to make a direct appropriation from the general fund. And it is to place pressure on the budgeting process to make sure spending levels are kept low enough that there will be a sufficient overage at the end of the year to meet the predetermined obligation for highways.

And how has the state historically held general revenue spending levels low, especially when public school funding must come off the top by court ruling to ensure “adequacy?”

It has done so with stingy, status-quo budgeting beginning with public colleges and universities, which are the easiest marks owing to their aforementioned ability to raise funds from tuition increases and student fees and via donations from alumni.

Within days of the highway program’s passage, public colleges and universities were announcing yet another tuition increase for next fall.

In much the same way that Obamacare is paying for highways— by infusing the general fund with large sums of federal Medicaid money—so are colleges and universities paying for highways by managing to get by year-to-year without appropriation increases from the state.

Prisoners are a drain on the general fund, but they don’t have any money to tap. Medicaid patients in nursing homes are in no condition to generate income.

So it’s college-goers, possessed of their lottery scholarships, who get the bill for asphalt overlays.

Absent a tax increase to generate actual additional money, something must give when the politicians tell you they’ve found a way to spruce up highways that is “revenue-neutral.”

And what must give is the college kid. Or his parents. Their pocketbooks are anything but “revenue-neutral.”

It’s just mathematics, which they teach at an advanced level in college at an ever-rising cost.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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