There are a lot of interesting stats in this WSJ opinion piece on how low tax states (e.g. Tennessee) are doing much better than high tax states (e.g. New Jersey.) But this statistic is hard to believe:
Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined.How cow, can that be true? Amazing.
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Laffer & Moore, WSJ:
"And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council..."A deeply shocking result. Can you imagine the look on the faces of the free market advocacy group that promotes conservative public policy, when they saw what their data "revealed"?
"...moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts."Yay, fun with statistics. It's also true that the average per capita income in top ten states like New York, New Jersey or Massachusetts is a third higher than Texas or Tennessee. It's easier to achieve "32% personal income growth" when you start from an income base below the national average than one well above it. And it's very hard for "anti-growth" states to tax that massive income advantage into oblivion.
"New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York."That IS incredible. Even though New Hampshire has fewer than 300,000 residents under the age of 18, while New York has 4 and a half million. There's certainly no difference in infrastructure or complexity to account for there.
Ah, yes, the Fallacy of Composition raises its ugly head.
Making a comparison based entirely on population in regards to education costs while making only passing mention of the generationally entrenched bureaucracy in New York.
The point is that high tax states have those entrenched bureaucracies that suck up ever more tax funds while providing less services. Scale back the bureaucracies and the costs go down. But that's a tough task. They aren't called 'entrenched' for nothing.
A bureaucracy's main function is to perpetuate itself, to spread until nothing can be done without it (and less can be done with it). The low tax states generally have kept them in check because there's no funding available to let them spread, no 'excess funds' to allow bureaucratic empire building.
And so it goes with education. New York's educational system is laden with bureaucratic inertia, driving costs up with little to show for it. New Hampshire's education bureaucracy is small (though they're still trying to ramrod broadbased taxes down the throats of taxpayers to allow explosive growth of that bureaucratic morass), hence lower educational costs.
Yeah, this piece is completely wrong. Texas sucks, its a bad place to live. If your a Yankee, do not move here, and if you already have please leave. Its really, really bad. Don't believe anything you read, just stay where you are.
Thanks
And the Fallacy of Division rears what is presumably its gorgeous, beautiful head. Because New York's educational bureaucracy is far larger and more monolithic than New Hampshire's, it must therefore be primarily responsible for the greater cost.
If only the raw data agreed. The number of students in New York's public school system, not even counting private education, is more than twice New Hampshire's entire population aged 0 to 120.
New York State has 1 school for every 2 teachers in all of New Hampshire.
Speaking of composition, New Hampshire is 96% white. There are newspaper articles discussing the "swell" of New Hampshire immigration since the 2000 census, which turns out to be 9,000 new Latino residents. Let's say 6,000 of them are of school age (surely an exaggerated number). In New York City, there could easily be 6,000 Latino students in three or four high schools.
Even at that implausible rate of population growth, it would take over 800 years for New Hampshire to absorb as many school-aged Latinos into its system as New York had just this morning. Think that has anything to do with the per-student discrepancy in school costs? Or is it all about the slow-moving paper-pushers?
Normally economies of scale push price per unit down. To argue that New York is larger and therefore must spend more per student is economic silliness. So yes, slow moving paper pushers makes more sense.
Why, the reason is JUST THAT SIMPLE. (Can we assume you're a fan of President Obama's health care plan, then?)
Here's an article that mentions the high cost of New York education as compared with other cities, including per capita numbers. It's from 1913:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9902E7D9163DE633A25751C2A96F9C946296D6CF
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