Reject the Double Tax Hike

Reclaim Idaho's education initiative is a terrible idea

Reclaim Idaho has acquired enough signatures to place its Quality Education Act initiative on the November ballot. This measure is intended to raise more than $300 million that will be distributed to public school districts throughout the state. Despite claiming to be nonpartisan, Reclaim Idaho has partnered with several left wing organizations and candidates to support this initiative.

I wrote about Reclaim Idaho several months ago. Co-founder Luke Mayville is clearly progressive - he supports abortion, illegal immigration, and fights attempts to limit access to obscene materials for children. Treasurer Deborah Silver unsuccessfully ran for the legislature three times as a Democrat, and staffer Ashley Prince worked directly for the Democratic Party in 2020. Reclaim Idaho uses Democratic payment platform ActBlue to process donations, and received a large sum of money from the Movement Voter PAC, which supports the nationwide progressive movement.

Reclaim Idaho co-founder Luke Mayville during the 2018 campaign

Reclaim Idaho successfully placed their Medicaid Expansion initiative on the ballot in 2018 and it was passed by voters. Today, Idaho taxpayers supply about $830 million out of $4 billion in Medicaid spending. Now they want more. The Quality Education Act would create a new tax bracket for anyone making more than $250,000 per year and hike their taxes to nearly 11%. Because the initiative text was written before this year’s tax reform bill, both the Secretary of State and Attorney General’s offices agree that it would also undo those changes. That means that, contrary to Reclaim Idaho’s statements that this would only raise taxes on the top 1% of earners, it would instead raise taxes on nearly all Idahoans.

Mr. Mayville claims that the Secretary of State should have updated the initiative to reflect the new 2022 rates, but Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck said they had no authority to alter the language of the initiative.

Source: Idaho Freedom Foundation

There is an even bigger problem with the numbers, however. According to an analysis by Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation, the section of law in the new initiative is worded backwards, so that instead of raising the threshold for the highest tax bracket to adjust for inflation, it will actually lower it. The result of this wording is that eventually the threshold will fall to a point where it affects many more taxpayers.

The initiative also creates a tax cliff, a point at which a single additional dollar of taxable earnings will manifest $1,300 in additional taxes. The faulty inflation math means that this tax cliff will have risen to more than $9,000 in additional taxes at the margin ten years from now, and that is assuming a modest 2.5% inflation rate. Our current rate of inflation is over 9%, and there are no signs that it will slow anytime soon.

To sum up, this initiative creates a new tax bracket, improperly applies inflation adjustments that will bring the threshold down in the future, and also erases this year’s tax reform. On top of that, it raises the corporate tax rate from 6% to 8%. Those tax hikes are worth it to fund education, right?

No.

Reclaim Idaho’s premise for this initiative is that our public school system is subpar, and that it can be improved with more money. This hypothesis has been disproved time and again throughout our country, but leftists will never tire of dumping more taxpayer money into failing systems.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation has already launched salvos at the initiative - see above for one of them. Branden Durst also wrote about the initiative in his new role with the Idaho Family Policy Center. On the other side of the party, former GOP State Chairman Trent Clark has put together an excellent list of reasons to oppose this measure. When such completely diametrically opposed voices come together to say the same thing then that is a good idea to at least hear them out.

Even if you believe we should spend more on education, there is no reason to raise taxes right now. The State of Idaho just announced a $1.4 billion surplus, which does not even count the rainy day fund of an additional $1.2 billion. The rainy day fund itself includes approximately $200 million earmarked for public education. The legislature also increased education funding by nearly a billion dollars this year, for a total of $2.34 billion in state funding for K-12 education.

Dumping more money into the public school system is always popular in election years. Less often do we ask what we are actually getting in return for our money. The Idaho State Constitution requires us to provide free public education, which implies an interest in making sure it is a good one. Idaho students graduate at about an 80% rate, around the middle of national rankings. During their time in the K-12 system, students are taught not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but anti-white Critical Race Theory and deviant Queer Theory, despite state laws supposedly banning such instruction. School teachers and administrators resist efforts by parents and lawmakers to keep such things out of our community schools.

In no other industry does failure prompt more investment. If a local restaurant was getting bad reviews with customers complaining about poor service and bad food, would it make sense to give the servers and cooks raises? If you take your car into the shop to get the oil changed and you get it back with a busted transmission, would you be inclined to pay them again to fix what they broke? Yet public schools consistently fail our students, and administrators, teachers, and advocates have the audacity to demand more taxpayer dollars.

Reclaim Idaho worded their initiative in such a way that funds would be dispersed directly to schools to be used in specific ways, with neither local input nor any oversight in how those funds are actually used. There is also no performance metrics - public school advocates on the left dislike such accountability, and would rather spend all the money in the world than hold schools and teachers accountable for the job they do.

In my former home state of Washington, I noticed the incestuous relationship between teacher unions and Democratic legislators. The unions extracted cash from their members, who were mostly progressive already, and donated it to Democrats who controlled the state legislature. Those Democrats then allocated more and more taxpayer money to the public school system. It was basically a form of money laundering.

We must not let the same system develop here. Schools need accountability, not more money; they need more local control, not cash infusions directed by left-wing organizations. We need parents on school boards deciding what curricula are used in their communities. We need school choice - both to allow families to make their own education decisions, as well as to create competition that will force public schools to improve. This initiative offers none of these things, rather, it is another effort to move Idaho in the direction of California, Oregon, and Washington; to confiscate more tax dollars and hand them to a system and an interest group that already leans left.

Trent Clark said it well: “The initiative is calculated to sell a simplistic narrative, TAX THE RICH TO FUND SCHOOLS, but it is actually a deceptive ploy to expand socialist policy in Idaho without truly improving how Idaho schools perform.”

We must ignore the appeals to emotion that Reclaim Idaho is preparing and instead evaluate this measure on its merits, or lack thereof. I urge everyone to vote NO on this reckless tax hike that will do absolutely nothing to improve our public school system nor the students and families it is meant to serve.