Tennessee remains statistically challenged
by Barry Henderson
Statistics can be deadly, especially when they're doled out piecemeal. Taken to heart, they can be confusing. They can be the source of great consternation, and they can be as misleading as they are instructive. But we are a nation geared to and sometimes driven by statistical information, summaries, and conclusions. Lots of people take those numbers seriously and act on them. Few of those, it seems, are Tennesseans.
We've been hammered for years with the statistically supported and shrilly chronicled news that we are, as political figures of either party may put it, first in roads and last in education.
The headlines support that claim, more or less. When fresh surveys are published, the news value is often portrayed in terms of shock value, but it's usually not news, really. Tennessee perennially flounders around the bottom in educational spending, always scrambling to stay a rung above poor old Mississippi. And by measures of quality, our highways rank near the top in state-by-state comparisons.
Then someone points out that we have the lowest per-capita tax load in the nation, and that standardized test scores and pupil-teacher ratios are up near the middle of the states' curve, meaning that we get a lot of bang for our buck in the area of public education. Then someone else counters that we have among the lowest high school graduation rates, and that we're in the bottom 10 in spending on higher education. And there's someone else who draws out the numbers to show that we have the third best-rated public roadways, even though we are next to lowest in per-capita spending here on highways.
So there's a lot to digest, statistically speaking, and some of it's contradictory.
One source that assembles a lot of data together in one place is the latest edition of the 50 State Comparisons booklet distributed by The Taxpayers Network, a Wisconsin-based national membership organization that serves as a sort of watchdog, always on the lookout for numerical studies. Those stats are also available online at: www.taxpayersnetwork.org.
The Taxpayers Network is more than 10 years old and boasts tens of thousands of members across the country. It conducts and publishes research into government programs and expenditures, taxation, economic prosperity, health and welfare, and education.
Once all those numbers can be crunched at one location, some patterns emerge in the Tennessee columns, and they are not encouraging on the whole. The discouraging indications become evident when the numbers are examined in full view of one another. They demonstrate that a lag in spending on education is probably responsible for shortfalls in other areas that negatively affect quality of life here. And those numbers congeal in terms of our painfully low total tax collections and our cripplingly regressive tax structure.
While we have achieved the highest sales tax rates in the country, we have no income tax and are low in average taxes on property, on gasoline, tobacco, and alcohol, and on gambling, at least until the state lottery is put in place next year. The lottery, with its built-in educational benefits, won't solve the question of tax reform. Nor will it boost the per-capita spending rate on education to anywhere near the national average. It's just a start.
Our population is at No. 12 in the percent living below the poverty level. That's almost 15 percent. We're in the bottom 10 in median family income, with almost three percent of our citizens receiving public welfare. That puts the state in the top four for welfare assistance by percent of population. Tennesseans are in the bottom 20 among all states in the number of people going without health insurance. That's 11 percent of us, despite TennCare and its general application and its abuses, real and perceived.
So when Phil Bredesen inherited the state's money problems as he was elected governor, he fell heir to a dilemma that his predecessors could not solve. Don Sundquist made a noble, if politically suicidal, attempt to reform the tax structure. Ultimately, it will now depend on Bredesen's ability to lead the backward elements of the Legislature out of the backwoods and into the daylight. The prospects may be dim in his first term. Surely by the start of the next gubernatorial term three years hence, tax reform will be inevitable.
November 6, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 45
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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