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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Voters In Seatlle Just Taxed Themselves To Pay Preschool For The Poor




If you're a liberal looking for some solace after last night's Republican rout in the midterms, there is a place where progressives rule, where voters want government to increase support for the poor, where the idea of taxing the rich to do that doesn't come off like class warfare. It's Seattle.
And last night residents there voted to tax themselves to fund a $58 million pilot program providing city-subsidized high-quality childcare to low-income families. What's more, the measure won with 67 percent of the vote. And the main dispute wasn't over whether or not to invest in universal preschool — but which proposal to choose.
From the Seattle Times:
The Proposition 1B levy will cost the owner of a Seattle home valued at $400,000 about $43 a year, according to the city. The money will go to select, high-quality preschools to provide slots to families based on income. It will ramp up over time, serving 280 children in 2015, and subsidizing up to 2,000 by 2018.
It will make preschool free for families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $70,000 a year for a family of four.
And it will subsidize preschool on a sliding scale for families earning up to 760 percent of the federal poverty level, or $185,000 for a family of four. Families making more will receive a 5 percent tuition subsidy.
The property tax, as Seattle Mayor Ed Murray puts it, will cost homeowners each month less than the cost of a latté.
And the potential benefits? Research suggests that the earlier we invest in children, the greater the returns, for both kids and society. And those returns can play out in higher graduation rates, lower crime, better job outcomes and less welfare use. Spend a dollar of public money on early childhood interventions like great preschool, and society may get backanywhere from $1.80 to $17.07.


Emily Badger is a reporter for Wonkblog covering urban policy. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities.
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Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris: On Taxes

25 December, 1783

"The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law. All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."


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