The GOP austerity regime has real-life consequences in America, folks. The GOP tax scam bill is going to remove trillions from state budgets over the next decade and states are going to be expected to pick up the tab. Should you want to see the future if the Republicans continue to control the House and Senate in 2019, you have to look no further than Oklahoma, now drowning in red ink to the point where lawmakers have gutted schools to the point where they are only open four days out of the week now.
FORTY miles from Tulsa, sometimes along unpaved roads, sits Wagoner High School, with its 650 pupils, championship-calibre football team and show barn—a seemingly ordinary small-town school. But unlike most high schools, Wagoner is closed on Mondays. The reason, a severe reduction in state funds, has pushed 90 other school districts in Oklahoma to do the same. Teacher pay is the third-lowest in the country and has triggered a statewide shortage, as teachers flee to neighbouring states like Arkansas and Texas or to private schools. “Most of our teachers work second jobs,” says Darlene Adair, Wagoner’s principal. “A lot of them work at Walmart on nights and weekends, or in local restaurants.” Ms Adair hopes that Walmart does not offer her teachers a full-time job, which would be a pay rise for many.
The roots of the fiasco are not hard to determine. As in Oklahoma’s northern neighbour, Kansas, deep tax cuts have wrecked the state’s finances. During the shale boom, lawmakers gave a sweetheart deal to its oilmen, costing $470m in a single year, by slashing the gross production tax on horizontal drilling from 7% to 1%. North Dakota, by contrast, taxes production at 11.5%. The crash in global oil prices in 2014 did not help state coffers either. Oklahoma has also cut income taxes, first under Democrats desperate to maintain control over a state that was trending Republican, and then under Republicans, who swept to power anyway. Mary Fallin, the Republican governor, came to office pledging to eliminate the income tax altogether. Since 2008 general state funds for K-12 education in Oklahoma have been slashed by 28.2%—the biggest cut in the country. Property taxes, which might have made up the difference, are constitutionally limited.
Other state agencies are broke, too. Highway patrolmen are told not to fill their petrol tanks to save money. Those caught drunk-driving are able to keep their licences because there are no bureaucrats to revoke them. Prisons are dangerously overcrowded, to the point that the state’s director of corrections publicly says that “something is going to pop”. But unlike Kansas, whose Republican legislature eventually rebelled and reversed the tax cuts over the governor’s veto, Oklahoma will find its troubling experiment much more difficult to undo. Because of a referendum passed in 1992, any bill that seeks to raise taxes must be approved by three-quarters of the legislature.
No fact embarrasses Oklahomans more, or repels prospective businesses more, than the number of cash-strapped districts that have gone to four-day weeks. Yet even such a radical change may not help finances much. Paul Hill, a professor of education at the University of Washington, Bothell, estimates that the savings are “in the 1 or 2% range at most”. That sliver is still important to Kent Holbrook, superintendent of public schools in Inola (the self-styled “Hay Capital of the World”). “In my mind, that’s five or six teachers,” says Mr Holbrook. Already, from 2008 to 2016, he has lost 11 teachers from a corps that once numbered 100. He has also had to reduce Spanish classes and, for the tenth year running, delay buying new textbooks.
This is what the Tea Party movement has wrought in red state Midwest: states that literally can't afford to keep schools open five days a week anymore and haven't been able to buy new textbooks in over a decade because it would take a 75% vote from both chambers in the state legislature to raise a dime of new taxes to pay for basic services.
And mysteriously, those tax cuts went to big oil who walked away with the money and left the people of Oklahoma holding the bag.
There are only budget cuts now. And every year they get worse. It's hard to imagine a state that has cut education spending over the last decade more than Kansas of Kentucky, but there Oklahoma is, a state where Wal-Mart employees now make more than the people who teach their kids.
They decided government was the problem, it was the enemy, it had to be destroyed. Now they wonder who will keep the schools open, the roads open, put gas in State Patrol cars.
And they answer, very soon, will be "nobody".
Oklahoma is far from the only red state trapped and squeezed by Republicans until no more blood can come from the stone. West Virginia's GOP governor, billionaire coal magnate Jim Justice, is following the lead of Kentucky and Indiana and wants to add work requirements to pretty much all government assistance programs with the goal of driving people off the rolls.
Months after rejecting a Kentucky-style work requirement for Medicaid in West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice (R) now seems to be moving in the opposite direction — with assistance from the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ally and an affiliate of the Koch-funded State Policy Network.
The apparent switch is nothing new for Justice, who made a leap into politics when he ran for governor of West Virginia as a Democrat in 2016. Nine months after winning, Justice — the richest man in West Virginia and the state’s only billionaire — announced at a Trump rally that he was switching to the Republican party.
Today, Justice’s Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) is pushing a series of bureaucratic barriers to public assistance, including: three-month time limits for unemployed and part-time workers receiving food assistance (SNAP); a $2,250 limit on cash and assets that would penalize families receiving food assistance for modest savings; and a hefty contract for a private corporation to determine the assets of every member of a recipient family.
DHHR has already awarded Optum with a contract of $300 million over 10 years to verify eligibility for Temporary Assistance (income assistance for families with children), food assistance, Medicaid, and other programs — even as a bill that would create such a system is still under consideration in the state legislature. That legislation would incentivize the corporation to kick people off of these programs — requiring it to demonstrate greater savings than the cost of the contract in the first year. (A spokesperson for DHHR confirmed the 10-year contract with Optum worth more than $308 million, but denied that there is a savings requirement. The spokesperson said the state will “save approximately $55 million over 10 years while reducing its existing system cost.”)
The DHHR’s own study suggests that strict time limits on food assistance for people who are unemployed or underemployed is flawed. Its pilot project in nine counties with the best local economies in the state terminated SNAP for more than 5,400 jobless people. The agency’s nearly 14,000 job referrals led to just 259 people gaining employment. According to the DHHR, “Our best data does not suggest that the program has had a significant impact on the employment figures for the [targeted] population in the 9 counties.”
That didn’t come as a surprise to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy (WVCBP), which noted that the people most affected by the time limits tend to be “very poor and most have a high school education or less.” Unemployed and part-time workers terminated due to the limit typically have barriers to employment such as “a lack of transportation or driver’s license, mental or physical limitation, felony conviction, or were recently dismissed from a job.”
What the pilot project did have a significant impact on was federal dollars leaving the state to the tune of $13 million due to reduced SNAP caseloads, and an increased demand for assistance at local food banks and pantries that the providers couldn’t keep pace with.
“There was a 30 percent rise in meals served during the study,” said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach coordinator at the WVCBP. “You can see the exact point that people were thrown off SNAP — by July 2016 people had to be turned away by our churches, food banks, and missions. There is no reason to think it will do anything but get worse if we expand this policy.”
And remember, these austerity cuts to social programs are being made while the overall economy is good. When it starts turning bad again, and the warning signs of another impending recession are already here, these programs won't be able to handle the need.
At that point, things are going to get very bad, very fast in America.
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