Tom Lehman
Leo Casey wrote:
> Living in the municipality of Wall Street, I have no
> doubt that there are corporate tax abatements galore.
> New Jersey and Connecticut take great delight in
> bidding wars to attract corporations out of NYC with
> such abatements, and NYC responds in kind.
>
> But I am unconvinced that ending corporate tax
> abatements will solve the financing problems of public
> schools. I am in favor of it, like a hundred other
> progressive taxation measures, but not because I think
> it will resolve the problem of underfunded public
> schools. That certainly would not be the case in NYC,
> where public school funding does not come directly
> from property tax, but from the city's general
> coffers. But more generally, the communities which
> don't have a strong individual property owner base
> also don't have much of a corporate property base.
>
> It is also too easy, when one gets caught up in the
> not unimportant details of how school funding takes
> place, to forget that when all is said and done, this
> is fundamentally a problem of political will. When it
> is upper middle class, white kids in suburbia, ways
> are found to finance and provide quality, public
> education; when it is working class and poor kids,
> largely kids of color, in the inner city, there is no
> political will to provide the funding that would
> produce the same high quality, public education. If
> the wealthy and middle class white kids went to public
> school in NYC, believe me, all of this would change in
> a nanosecond. In New York, the state lottery [talk
> about regressive taxes!] was instituted with the
> promise that its returns would go to public education;
> they do, but the contribution from general tax
> revenues has decreased by the same amount. Given the
> fungibility of government revenue, almost any funding
> formula can be undone to the disadvantage of urban
> school districts, given the lack of political will to
> provide a quality education to "other people's
> children."
>
> > I'd be willing to bet Leo, that you couldn't even
> > find out how much property
> > tax has been abated in the school districts your
> > local represents! Your
> > New York state attorney general Spitzer, who I
> > hear is a pretty decent guy,
> > even with the authority of his office probably
> > couldn't find out!
>
> > If corporations in their various forms paid their
> > fair share of property taxes, there would be very
> > few school funding problems anywhere in the US.
>
> Leo Casey
> United Federation of Teachers
> 260 Park Avenue South
> New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
> agitation are men who want crops without plowing the
> ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
> They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
> waters.
> -- Frederick Douglass --
>
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