Changing the world, one little kid at a time!
The most leveraged investment, the investment that would have the strongest effect on educational outcomes would be a high-quality pre-school program for at-risk 3 and 4 year olds, with thoughtful attention paid to making sure we don’t damage the child care system for younger kids. (There is a lot of financial cross-subsidization to enable care of very young children.)
Click here to read the article.
Slides from today’s discussion.
PDF version: Education Funding in 2012 PPT version: Education Funding in 2012
Excel spreadsheet showing examples
Excel: Example – Levy Swap
A super crowd at the Redmond Chamber today. It was great to see everyone. I said I’d post the slides from today’s talk and here they are.
WA State Budget Preview (PDF, requires Adobe Reader.)
The New York Times ran a great article in the business section this week talking about the relationship between business and government. It’s a little historical perspective, including a plug for a great book I read this summer “Why Nations Fail.” I highly recommend the article AND the book.
This is another case where thinking about balance is useful. There are extremes on both ends of the spectrum that turn out to be not pleasant places to live. We’re clearly not interested in living a communist country, but we’re also not super excited about living in a world without public investment in roads, libraries, schools, etc.
One of the great joys of being an elected official is the unsolicited email you get from people. The Internet (thank you Al Gore) gives everyone a platform to say whatever they want and broadcast it the world over, for free. My favorite from the last few years was one that was seriously worried about black UN helicopters coming over the border from Canada. Fortunately I didn’t have to answer it – he wasn’t in my district.
Today all legislators and a host of media outlets got a message that looked official enough to fool the Seattle Times into briefly publishing it on their website – that the Ellensburg Rodeo had been cancelled due to the Taylor Bridge fire. (It has not.) I might have believed it if I had not gotten a similar email every year from (presumably) the same guy for much of the last decade. For some reason he doesn’t like the rodeo, which I hear is great fun.
Here’s the text of the message. It is NOT TRUE, but it IS funny. The guy puts a lot of work into it, including setting up a spoof website with nice pictures of flames and the same message.
Continue reading “Black helicopters, other fascinating emails”
The Office of Financial Management (OFM – the gov’s budget office) just released their 4-year budget outlook. This will be the basis for our new 4-year balanced budget requirement.
You can see the spreadsheet here.
It shows a “shortfall” of about half a billion dollars ($496 million) by the end of the next biennium, in 2015. This assumes no ending fund balance (not realistic) and full implementation of many laws that mandate additional spending in the future (also not realistic.) When we finished the current budget I thought this number would be around $100-$250 million, but we’re discovering new changes in assumptions as we do a more detailed look at future costs.
Any document looking this far out into the future is difficult to do and is based on a set of assumptions. This particular set are created by an amazing process of consensus between the Governor’s office and the non-partisan staff of the House and Senate. Eventually the forecast council will take a vote to formally adopt it so that it’s not a staff product, but one approved by elected folks. I don’t expect much contention about the assumptions – they’re pretty reasonable and they point out the difficulty in projects like this. You can read the basic ones on the back of the spreadsheet, and a more detailed look at future caseloads can be found at http://www.cfc.wa.gov/.
The biggest variable is the revenue forecast, which has proven really fickle over the last 4 years. Small changes in percentage growth lead to wild swings in revenue.
We’ll use this as the basic planning document as we devise a way to comply with the McCleary decision from the Supreme Court. I’ll continue to post on these issues.
For those who are interested the state is maintaining a website with information about the meetings the task force is holding. You can sign up at this website for notifications of meetings, perhaps the most interesting part of what is, for now, pretty empty and forlorn.
http://www.leg.wa.gov/jointcommittees/EFTF/Pages/default.aspx
Every time we start up a new group of legislators looking at how to fund a particular project (in this case the K12 Finance Joint Task Force) there are questions about the budget from members not familiar with it. Here are a set of reference links that should be useful for anyone seeking to understand how the overall budget for Washington State works.
(9/25/2014 Fixed link to DC study and updated it to the 2012 version.)
There were a number of questions asked in today’s K-12 Finance Task Force meeting about how taxpayers in different income strata experience Washington’s tax system. I’m providing some links to interesting data while we wait for more up-to-date information from the Office of Financial Management, which their representative Julie Murray promised in Sept-Oct.
At the school funding task force meeting this morning we discussed and adopted the a work plan for the exercise. The document describing this work plan is available here: Initial Plan for K-12 funding policy development . Below is the intro text from this document:
In January the Washington State Supreme Court ruled (in McCleary) that the state was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “amply provide for the education of all students residing within its borders…” The decision was unanimous, and came with a very strong enforcement model from the court that is still being worked out.
