Conservative

By Russ Wung

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If there’s one institution in the state budget that shouldn’t lose funding, it’s UW. Unfortunately, it appears that Olympia’s political class would rather ask us Huskies to cough up money instead of scaling back Gregoire’s governmental expansion.

Given the entrenched interests backing such a travesty, no lobbying by students or university officials is likely to prevent the budget reduction.

So how should the university respond?

First, there are a few things that shouldn’t be done. Cutting Mark Emmert’s salary is a favorite of the rabid egalitarians around campus. While it is true that Emmert is highly paid for a public university president, it is also true that his leadership has brought in massive amounts of private funding which, contrary to what most people think, makes up the bulk of the university’s budget. Private donations are likely to drop in the near future, and we need someone with a proven track record to keep as much money coming in as possible. Emmert is the right man for the crucial fund-raising duties of any university president, and his salary constitutes an appropriate recognition of his abilities.

Tuition increases are often brought up as a solution, since UW tuition is, in relative terms, extremely low. However, there’s one major problem here: The Husky Promise program means that 20 percent of UW students don’t pay tuition. The effect of the program is to reduce any revenue gain from tuition hikes by a corresponding percentage. Any such increases will also disproportionately affect students not on financial aid and out-of-state students. Raising tuition rates would be neither fair to those students nor as effective as it would have been prior to the creation of Husky Promise.

What does that leave? For one, reducing freshman admissions would reduce the need for a wide range of variable costs — including jobs, unfortunately. Increasing the selectiveness of the admissions process would avoid harming the quality of education for current students and would also improve the stature of the university and the overall average qualifications of incoming freshman classes. There are plenty of public universities in the United States with low admit rates, so it would hardly be out of line for the UW to raise the bar a little.

President Emmert stated in his blog that his goal in managing the fallout from the budget cuts is to “protect the instructional core of the University, which means greater proportionate reductions in non-academic areas, including administration and support activities.” While this is very bad news for many of the support staff, it also demonstrates that the university’s administration has its priorities in order and is — at least in principle — willing to cut itself down to size to avoid having to reduce instructional capacity.

Finally, even at a relatively efficient public institution such as UW, there is probably a significant amount of unnecessary expense in the budget apart from salaries. Budgetary crises are always good excuses to improve efficiency, so hopefully the administration scales back some of its less-useful initiatives.

The UW’s first duty is to its students, faculty and staff. If coping with budgetary cuts means reducing services for outside parties, that is unfortunate — but necessary if the university is to remain the prestigious institution we would all like it to be.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.

Liberal

By Chris Jordan

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While UW student lobbyists have been hard at work in Olympia fighting for every last penny of the state’s dwindling revenue, Washington’s budget forecasts have grown increasingly bleak.

A recent Seattle Times article stated that the deficit is likely to stay around a whopping $8 billion through the 2011 budget. With so many legitimate interests pleading for their slice (education, state employees, health care, etc.), legislators have been forced to choose where cuts will come from and how deep they will be.

The approach that the UW will take in response to the budget crisis will likely include a continued lobbying effort, tuition increases, staff layoffs and possible others. I’d like to see our university take a bolder and more visionary approach; I’d like to see our university support Senate Bill 5104.

This bill, proposed by Sen. Rosa Franklin, D-Tacoma, would abolish state property taxes, lower the sales tax significantly and institute a state income tax.

Before you start shouting things at your newspaper such as, “this liberal commie wants to raise my taxes,” let me explain.

Now, most of our state government’s revenue comes from the sales tax. Each time we go to the store to buy goods such as clothes or iPods, the state gets roughly 6.5 percent of the purchase.

According to a recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Washington state has the most regressive tax system of any U.S. state. The poorest fifth of our citizens pay almost 18 percent of their income to the state government in sales and property taxes. While, the richest one percent pays only three percent of their income in taxes. In other words, despite the fact that our state has voted for a Democratic candidate for president in every election since Reagan, we still severely overburden the poor and middle class with our system of taxation.

A switch to a progressive income tax system would not only make Washington taxation more fair, but it would generate more revenue. It’s estimated that if Senate Bill 5104 passes, it could generate a net gain of almost $1 billion for the state government by 2012, mainly from increased taxes on the wealthiest Washingtonians. While the rich would finally have to pay their fair share to our state, the poor and middle class would see their tax rates go down due to the end of property taxes and a reduction of the regressive sales tax.

While I’m not for drowning the wealthy in an ocean of taxes, it makes no sense, policy wise, to carry the state on the backs of the most financially vulnerable in our society.

If you could collect more money while decreasing tax rates on the vast majority of people, why wouldn’t you? An extra billion dollars could go a long way toward plugging the budget holes and easing massive cuts in the future.

Before you start yelling out loud, “Hey! This guy is a socialist who wants to steal from the rich to give to the poor,” take into account the fact that Congress instituted the first national progressive income tax in 1913. If the income tax is Marxist, then we were a nation of communists before World War I, comrade.

I’m not saying that state tax reform would be politically easy to accomplish; it won’t. I am saying, however, that I hope that our university will take a principled stand and fight for sensible policies that will ultimately make its students better off. Beyond simply begging the Legislature for money, the UW should fight for ways to increase state revenues, while alleviating the tax burden on poor and middle class families.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

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