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Thursday, September 19, 200217 Bored Governors?
Senator and former Governor Bob Graham thinks Florida needs some more governors. This one only sounds simple.
Amendment 11 – Establishes a Board of Governors for the state university system and boards of trustees at each university
Before Jeb Bush was elected governor, a Board of Regents ran the university system, making policy decisions for each school and for the whole system. Bush abolished this arrangement, replacing it with a board of trustees at each school to deal with local issues, leaving statewide decisions to the Education Department.
Graham thinks this makes it too easy for the legislature to ‘meddle’ in education and gives some credible examples. For the past two years he has been quietly pushing a citizen’s initiative to get this on the ballot in order to distance the system from legislative shenanigans.
The amendment still has local boards and that’s good. The Governor would appoint fourteen of the seventeen system Governors, subject to Senate confirmation, who would serve staggered terms of seven years.
I am undecided on this one. I like the local boards and worry about too much centralized planning, although insulating the system from legislative interference is attractive. But if the system is less responsible to the legislature, it is also less responsible to the people. Does this amendment set up a fourth branch of government that is answerable to no one? The legislature would still have to approve the budget, so I'm not so sure how much independence the board would actually have.
It is worth noting that the legislature, the governor and none of the university presidents favors this amendment. That doesn’t automatically make it bad, but it has to carry some weight.
Brad DeLong reviews a NYT article by David Johnston which describes how much of the recent tax cut will be lost to the Alternative Minimum Tax, as more middleclass taxpayers find themselves subject to it. The AMT was supposed to be aimed at only the highest earners, of course, but the article claims that by 2010, eighty-five percent of taxpayers with two or more children could be paying it rather than regular rates.
"What was a class tax is becoming a mass tax," said Len Burman of the Urban Institute, one of the study's authors and a tax expert under former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Both DeLong and Johnston seem to imply that this is reason to mistrust the Bush administration, but that is too narrow. Turning a class tax into a mass tax is just business as usual for Washington.
According to this, in 1913 Congress established a tax on the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and the other 90% were happy in the knowledge that they would not be subject to any sort of tax on their income.
As DeLong says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me ten times, shame on me."