The question came up in the Searchers Sunday School class at First Christian Church in Jefferson City yesterday.
Perhaps the question arose, at least partly, because on Saturday, the third annual Prayerfest attracted hundreds of people to the Capitol to pray for ten things: marriage and family, religious liberty, fostering and adopting, law enforcement, sexual exploitation, business and farming, government, racial tensions, right to life, and education.
Lower taxes didn’t make that list.
The bill passed by the legislature last week will reduce general revenue by $764 million a year. My friend Rudi Keller at Missouri Independent has noted the state’s general revenue fund had $12.9 billion in revenue in the most recent fiscal year and the state ended the year with almost $5 billion unspent.
But shouldn’t it have been spent?
Just because the state has it doesn’t mean the state should spend it. But Missouri clearly has public needs that are not being met. Whether it is more responsible to give a little bit of money back to a lot of people or to use that money to served thousands is an ethical—and religious—question.
The 2003 Missouri General Assembly passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act intended to keep the state from restricting the free exercise of religion except under specific, limited, circumstances. But we often have been reminded that freedom carries with it responsibilities.
Perhaps we need a Religious Responsibility Restoration Act that relies on Cain’s refusal to accept responsibility for the welfare (or even the life) of his brother. The Judeo-Christian tradition does say that there is a personal responsibility for our neighbors, even those we don’t like (recall the Good Samaritan story).
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “Pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.” And he told the Romans, “Let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may build up another.”
Instead of using money legitimately gained for the benefit of many, it appears the governor and the legislature have decided to lessen the state’s ability to pay the costs of the services thousands of Missourians need.
The Missouri Budget Project reports these things:
–Between FY 2007 and FY 2020, there was a 22% cut in Missouri’s investment in programs to support independent living when adjusted to today’s dollars.
–While average incomes and property taxes increase over time, circuit breaker eligibility guidelines and the size of the credit have remained flat since the last increase in 2008. As a result, fewer people qualify for the credit over time and those that do are more likely to fall higher on the phase-out scale – meaning they qualify to receive a smaller credit. In addition, Missourians who rent from a facility that is tax-exempt were cut from the Circuit Breaker Program in 2018.
—When adjusted for inflation, required per student funding for K-12 schools was significantly lower in FY 2022 than it was in 2007. That is, the value of our state’s investment in its students is less than it was 15 years ago.
—Missouri’s investment in K-12 education is also far below the national average. Our state revenue spending per child is less than 60% of what the average state spends to educate its children.
—Even with today’s rosy budget, Missourians can’t access long term care through the Department of Mental Health, child welfare workers are overwhelmed, and the state’s foster care system is in desperate need. Vulnerable Missourians – including kids – are being put at risk because Missouri has the lowest paid state employees in the country, resulting in staff vacancies.
Others reports indicate services (that in many cases are more important to thousands of people than a small tax refund) are badly in need of the funds the legislature and the governor want to give away:
Stats America ranks Missouri 38th in public welfare expenditures. $1581. Mississippi is 20th at $2,098. W. Va is tenth at $2,722. Alaska, Massachusetts and New York are the only states above $3,000.
Spending on education: USA Facts. (from the Economics Lab at Georgetown University) Nationwide, the top spending schools by expenditure per student spent $40,566 or more in 2019, more than three times the median school expenditure per student of $11,953. Missouri was at was $10,418. That’s 37th in the country.
We were 26th in per capita spending on mental health services. Missouri ranks 40th in mental health care, says Healthcare Insider.com
Average teacher pay 52,481 says World Population review. 39th among the states.
We are 32nd in police and corrections spending.
It’s not as if we are overburdened. The Tax Foundation says we are 27th overall in tax burden, 22nd property taxes burden.
Against that background is this assessment of the tax cut enacted by the legislature last week:
The Missouri Budget Project, which evaluates state tax policy and state needs says “A middle class family earning $52,000 will see only about $5.50 in tax savings each month. But the millionaire across town will get more than $4,200 a year.” (To make sure that we’re comparing apples and apples, the middle class family’s annual savings will be $66 a year under the MBP projections.)
Reporter Clara Bates wrote for Missouri Independent about three weeks ago that “the Department of Social Services had an overall staff turnover rate of 35% in the last fiscal year ranking second among state agencies of its size after only the Department of Mental Health.”
It’s even worse for the Children’s Division: “Among frontline Children’s Division staff — including child abuse and neglect investigators and foster care case managers — the turnover rate last year was 55%, according to data provided by DSS. That means more than half of the frontline staff working at Children’s Division across the state at the start of the last fiscal year had left by the end of the year.” Why the turnover? High workloads for the staff. And the high workloads lead to more employees leaving at a time when the state needs to be hiring MORE people.
Missouri has almost 14,000 children in foster care. The national average for children finding a permanent home within a year of entering the system is 42.7%. The average in Missouri is “just over 30%.”
The politically-popular pledge to “shrink government” is exacting a terrible price on those who need its help. The Department of Social Services has lost more than one-third of the employees it had twenty years ago. The number of employees in the Children’s Division is down almost 25% since 2009
The number of full-time personnel at DSS shrunk by a third in the last two decades. The Children’s Division has had nine directors in the last ten years.
But instead of using the money the state has to ease or correct these more-than regrettable situations, the governor and the legislature are giving away $764 million dollars a year with the bill passed last week.
It’s always politically easy to cut taxes, especially in an election year. It’s easy to talk about how much an individual taxpayer might get back. It’s harder to confront the damage that might be done to the services that taxpayer needs or relies on.
A lot of people in the legislature and a lot of people in the broad citizenry of Missouri speak proudly of their religiosity. And many of them think the concept of “shrinking government” is a laudable accomplishment.
We should beware of the Pharisees who do not consider whether they are their brother’s keepers and who fail to realize that freedom of religion also carries a religious responsibility to “pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.”
In the Sunday School class yesterday we asked whether the tax cut that will become law soon is the Christian thing to do—-a question that we hope bothers at least some of those who are so boastful that this is and always has been a Christian nation.
Well, is it—a Christian thing to do?
Am I my brother’s keeper? How does saving $5.50 a month in taxes answer that?
