Buckeye Voices: Tax Foundation’s Atkins on the Appropriations through Litigation Movement
Friday, September 14th, 2007 By David HansenThe Tax Foundation’s Chris Atkins reviews the impact the cottage industry of increasing school spending through litigation has had on state budgets over the past decade or so in our latest BuckeyeVoices podcast.
Far from being a homegrown, grassroots reaction to school spending disparities, the DeRolph case is just one example of over 20 where the state school spending lobby has tried to enlist activist judges in overruling the spending decisions of elected officials.
Interestingly, Chris’s analysis backs up what Ohio Republicans have often claimed, which is that they responded to DeRolph by significantly increasing state spending on public schools.
Too bad many of these same Republicans have vigorously denigrated the Tax Foundation’s and Chris’s competence in assessing Ohio’s job-killing 5th-in-the-nation state and local tax burden (and you know who you are, Ron Amstutz and Bill Sietz) when the facts didn’t serve their purposes.
Tags: School Finance
