Steve Novick: Let people know where tax dollars go
There appears to be a “constituency for facts." It's time to give them the information they desire and deserve.
Environmental lawyer, former Sizemore fighter, former Portland City Commissioner, believer in taxing the rich and letting people know where tax dollars go.
Polls show that people have little idea where their tax dollars go, at any level of government. When presented with lists of actual major government programs, only a minority want to cut spending on any of them. People don’t want to cut Social Security (the largest Federal program), or education or health care (by far the largest state spending categories). And, as we have been told repeatedly, large majorities are opposed to “defunding the police”—which represent the largest share of city budgets.
But when people are asked how much of government spending is “wasted,” the numbers are huge. A 2014 Gallup poll showed that Americans think 51% of Federal spending, 42% of state spending, and 37% of local government spending is “wasted.” A 2016 Oregon-specific poll showed voters think a nearly identical number—44%—of the state budget is wasted.
The only way to reconcile those numbers is to conclude that voters believe, inaccurately, that a huge percentage of government spending goes to programs they don’t like. Indeed, a 2013 YouGov poll confirmed that most people—60%—think of “waste” as "money spent on programs that are unnecessary," as opposed to 26% who viewed it as "money spent ineffectively on programs that are necessary." To some extent this reflects specific beliefs that specific programs are larger than they are: polls consistently show that voters think that “foreign aid” is 20% or more of the Federal budget, when it actually represents 1% or less. I suspect that to a greater extent the general interpretation of waste reflects a vaguer belief that “they must be spending lots of money on stupid stuff.”
This confusion is problematic for democracy in general, but it is especially problematic in an initiative state like Oregon. Initiative-mongers can propose tax cuts without specifying the spending cuts that will be required, or spending increases on particular programs without proposing new taxes or offsetting cuts, knowing that many voters will think “oh, they can just make up the difference by cutting waste.”
For the past 24 years, on and off, I have been pushing a fairly obvious solution that never seems to catch on: why don’t we just tell people where their tax dollars go?
Because the fact is that pretty much nobody does that. The Governor doesn’t hold press conferences on April 15 saying “here is where your tax dollars go.” Neither does the President of the United States. The Oregon Department of Revenue doesn’t send taxpayers a receipt for their income taxes telling people they’re supporting education and health care. City, county and school districts officials don’t hold events on November 15—when property taxes are due—explaining that property tax dollars mostly go to police, fire, jails and schools, with a little left over for things like parks and libraries.
There’s a limit to how much I can complain, because when I was on the Portland City Council, I unforgivably didn’t do November 15 events myself. In the crush of day-to-day business I neglected my own cherished long-term goal.
But the fact that I messed up doesn’t change the fact that everyone else has as well. I know that the conventional wisdom is “you don’t change people’s minds with facts.” When it comes to strongly held beliefs, that’s probably true. But I don’t think people have a strongly held belief that education and health care don’t consume the lion’s share of the state budget, for example. I think people just make vague assumptions about something nobody’s ever given them any information about.
In fact, a 1995 University of Maryland poll showed that a lot of people are receptive to budget information. The poll showed that 63% of Americans wanted to cut foreign aid. It also showed that on average people estimated that foreign aid made up over 20% of the federal budget, in line with the surveys mentioned above. When the pollsters said, “Actually, it’s less than 1%,” and asked, “Do you still want to cut foreign aid?”, only 35% still wanted to cut it. So there appeared to be a “constituency for facts” amounting to a hefty 28% of Americans.
Personally, I think we should start teaching this stuff in school. Even to the extent there is civics education in schools any more, I think it’s mostly focused on abstract concepts like how a bill becomes a law. I don’t think it would be too much to ask that before students graduate from high school, they should know that police and fire are the biggest costs in city government; that education, health care, and prisons are where almost all state income tax dollars go; and, that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the military are most of the Federal budget.
I have firsthand experience indicating that high school students might be interested in this kind of information. In 2005, working for a tax-and-budget education non-profit called Citizens for Oregon’s Future, I developed (at the suggestion of a student teacher) a “balance the State budget” exercise. The legislature was facing an expected budget deficit of $803 million. With the help of a lot of nice people in State government, I put together long lists of tax increases and spending cuts, and found six teachers around the state—in Portland, Salem, Springfield and Creswell—who were willing to dedicate a good chunk of class time to the exercise. All of them divided their classes into groups of three or four, and each team developed its own proposal.
I had the honor of listening to the class presentations in Creswell and at Madison High in Portland. Two things struck me: one was that the students seemed really engaged; the other was that the kids in Creswell, where George Bush had won handily, were no less likely to raise taxes than the Portland kids. Presented with a practical problem, they did not default to their parents’ presumed ideology. And, I’m not sure that, given good information, their parents would either.
So that’s my silver bullet. I hope someday someone uses it.
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