Idaho Mountain Express: Make Idaho’s money work

Friday, January 24, 2014

Make Idaho’s money work

    An alternative budget put together by Idaho’s former state economist, Mike Ferguson, demonstrates clearly that Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s proposed budget missed the boat on education.
   The alternative budget has supporters on both sides of the aisle, including former Superintendents of Public Instruction Jerry Evans and Marilyn Howard, a Re-publican and Democrat respectively. It’s also gotten the support of two members of the Governor’s Task Force for Improving Education.
   The alternative budget would power up education spending at a far higher rate than the governor’s proposal. It would re-duce by $71 million the amount of money targeted at boosting the state’s $291 mil-lion in Rainy Day funds. It would elimi-nate $30 million in tax relief. It would re-direct this money to funding education.
   Ferguson and the Idaho Center for Fis-cal Policy produced a report in 2012 that showed that Idaho’s public school funding had decreased significantly for 13 years because of tax cuts and increased funding of Medicaid.
   Today, Idaho ranks 49th of the states in funding education. It’s not a rank to be proud of especially when the nonprofit Education Week Research Center gives Idaho kids a mediocre C- grade in K-12 achievement.
   Gov. Otter has touted his efforts to move the Idaho economy to more than $60 billion. Now he should try to move the needle on the state’s dismal level of just one in four people with a bachelor’s de-gree.
   Socking away more money in savings and reducing taxes isn’t going to get the state the prosperous economy Idahoans want and need. With signs of economic recovery beginning in a state slammed hard by the national recession, it’s a time to fuel the recovery by producing better educated, innovative and resourceful citi-zens instead of squirreling away money that sits idly by.

viagra kaufen
comprare viagra
comprar viagra

About Comments

Comments with content that seeks to incite or inflame may be removed.

Comments that are in ALL CAPS may be removed.

Comments that are off-topic or that include profanity or personal attacks, libelous or other inappropriate material may be removed from the site. Entries that are unsigned or contain signatures by someone other than the actual author may be removed. We will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or any other policies governing this site. Use of this system denotes full acceptance of these conditions. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

The comments below are from the readers of mtexpress.com and in no way represent the views of Express Publishing, Inc.

You may flag individual comments. You may also report an inappropriate or offensive comment by clicking here.

Flagging Comments: Flagging a comment tells a site administrator that a comment is inappropriate. You can find the flag option by pointing the mouse over the comment and clicking the 'Flag' link.

Flagging a comment is only counted once per person, and you won't need to do it multiple times.

Proper Flagging Guidelines: Every site has a different commenting policy - be sure to review the policy for this site before flagging comments. In general these types of comments should be flagged: