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Whenever any significant public program is proposed, someone inevitably asks “how are you going to pay for it?”
There’s nothing wrong with asking how tax dollars are spent. But this kind of question has hidden assumptions — implying the current budgets of our cities, states, and counties are somehow “natural” or “normal” the way they are.
Any departure from the status quo has to justify itself. Fine. But we also have to ask how we arrived at the status quo in the first place.
Is it “natural” or “normal” for 5% of the incomes in Multnomah County to be so high that taxing only the portion of them over ~$200k at 3.9% yields enough money to pay for preschool for any family that wants it?
No. This distribution of incomes did not “just happen.” It is the result of the exercise of human power. People set out to make this concentration of wealth at the upper end possible, and it worked.
But as Portland’s own Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Besides examining the water we’re swimming in, we need to question the very premise that creating something like free universal preschool is an expense. What if it’s an investment that creates a return?
Let’s look at this report from @EconomicPolicy’s @eliselgould and @hunterfblair called Who’s Paying Now? https://www.epi.org/publication/whos-paying-now-costs-of-the-current-ece-system/
Nationally, they found, public spending on early childhood education is about $34 billion a year ($22.2b federal, $11.8b state and local).
$34 billion a year for a broken system.
$34 billion a year for a broken system.
Parents, meanwhile, spend another $42 billion a year on early childhood education.
And that’s not all. Besides tuition, parents are losing $30–$35 billion in income as they work less, or stop working altogether, to care for their children. And let’s be real — it’s mostly mothers who are doing that.
That lost parental income translates to lost tax revenue of about $4.2 billion a year.
So we can’t decide that the current system is the baseline, and anything we spend to improve or replace it is an extra expense. Someone is paying now.
It’s just not the top 5%, who benefit from the economic status quo and have the money to pay for it comfortably.
It’s just not the top 5%, who benefit from the economic status quo and have the money to pay for it comfortably.
But what if we did publicly fund universal preschool? What would the economic impact of that be?
The report found that paying early education teachers comparably to K-8 teachers would mean a nationwide income gain of $80.3 billion. And the tax revenue gains, they found, would be about $42.9 billion.
The report concludes that publicly funded early education has “Fiscal benefits that outpace fiscal costs. Sufficient investment in a high-quality system will more than pay for itself in the long run.”
