Bold leadership for a bold plan: Columnist Ryan Ryals

Sleepy voters; it’s time to wake up again. The school levy machine is gearing up in the Tahoma school district, and school officials are looking for $125 million to construct new schools and remodel others. That sounds like a lot, until you learn that Kent just passed a school levy last year that will collect around $240 million, and that’s just to keep the schools operating.

I’ve heard plenty of grumbling about the latest school bond in Tahoma; even from teachers in the district, and the word on the street is that it’s not likely to pass. It might be because the few voters who are able to fill in several bubbles and buy a stamp to mail in the ballot don’t have an appetite for new property taxes.

But voters also don’t have an appetite for increases in the sales tax, business tax, or the creation of an income tax. If you ask anyone who should be paying more in taxes, it’s always “the other guy”. You probably don’t know this, but the other guy just said the same about you.

That’s a fundamental flaw we all have, which is an immature view of taxation. We’re never going to joyfully pay taxes unless they directly benefit us, and we’re too busy to keep up with tax policy decisions and understand them fully. We get angry at the people we hire to do that job for us, because they aren’t coming back from Olympia with free government services, new roads, gleaming schools and taxes on somebody else.

They’ve tried, though mostly through taxing lots of naughty things like cigarettes, beer, candy, and bottled water, plus some increases on those mean and heartless corporations. These elaborate schemes are designed to make it seem like the other guy is paying, and to spread the pain over dozens of small areas in your life.

What else could we do? For a while, some schools tried putting soda machines in, since the contracts can mean tens of thousands of dollars per month for a school district. Colorado Springs recently landed a 10-year, $10 million contract with Coke. That sounds great, until you realize that the money going into those machines is coming from the same people who would have shouldered the tax anyway. It’s time to get creative.

We’re not ready for NASCAR-style sponsorship yet, but those buses could use a style makeover. These giant rolling billboards aren’t advertising anything at the moment. King County Metro buses have billboards on three sides; school buses have none. They’re painted yellow for visibility reasons, but how could you miss a bus that was completely painted over like an ad for a Transformers movie?

Let’s not stop there. Kids spend hundreds and thousands of dollars buying the right clothes and the right brands to wear to school. These kids are already walking advertisements for Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, Pac-Sun and so on, so why don’t we switch over to brand-sponsored uniforms? If every kid had to wear a Xbox 360 shirt to school (choice of 5 colors), we can probably squeeze a few million out of Microsoft.

What about naming rights for schools? Forget “Cedar River Middle School”; think “Monster Energy Drink Dayclub”. Today’s English class is now sponsored by the letter R and Late Night Cheeseburger Doritos.

These are all brilliant ideas (thank you), but guess what. Sponsorships are still just like taxes. When Budweiser runs a Super Bowl ad for $3 million, those ads are paid for by you (but not me; I don’t drink Budweiser). Every time a company pays for advertising, it goes right into the cost of the product.

The same happens when we raise taxes on “the other guy”, such as those mean and heartless corporations. When their taxes are raised, they simply pass the costs onto us. If the grocery store’s property tax rate goes up by 10 percent, it gets built into the price of your food. That’s the real trickle-down theory of economics. Tax burdens trickle down to us. Every time.

We’re still being fooled by these elaborate tax schemes, and probably will for a long time. Mature attitudes toward the role of funding essential government services and schools won’t be changed by some weird-looking columnist in a local paper; it will take bold leadership by our elected officials to tell us that we need to grow up. That won’t get them re-elected or pass their levies, but it would be a grand sacrifice for the greater good.