The Coalition for Ohio’s Future is a broad-based, bi-partisan organization including teachers and other educators, firefighters, police, elected officials, concerned citizens, social service organizations, business people, doctors and other health professionals, labor unions, senior citizens, faith-based organizations and many others all dedicated to defeating the TEL Amendment.
A State of Decline: What a TABOR Would Mean for Ohio
by David Bradley and Iris J. Lav
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
April 19, 2005
If a constitutional amendment to limit expenditures — similar to Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) — had been in place over the last decade in Ohio, state and local services would have deteriorated substantially. Assuming a TABOR limit, such as the one most recently proposed by Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, had been adopted in 1994, effective for fiscal year 1995, a cumulative total of $19 billion would have been cut from state expenditures for programs and services over the ensuing 11 years.
State General Revenue Fund expenditures in fiscal year 2005 could be no higher than $14.9 billion, had the Blackwell TABOR limit begun in 1995.
- The limitation would have held FY 2005 expenditures to approximately $3 billion below actual expenditures this year.
- Expenditures for FY 2005 would have had to be 17 percent lower than they actually are.
This report illustrates the potential magnitude and impact of such a cut. It looks at the degree to which programs and services would have to have been reduced in FY 2003 if a TABOR limit had been effective since FY 1995. (FY 2003 is the latest year for which full data are available.) For sake of discussion, it assumes that total expenditures would be reduced to the permitted level by cutting all areas of state government expenditures proportionally. Thus if K-12 education makes up one-third of the budget, it would receive one-third of the expenditure reductions.
While actual reductions would likely differ from this assumption, proportional reductions provide an indication of the types of reductions that would be required. Lesser cuts in any one area would have to be offset with deeper cuts in another. (See Different ways to make TABOR cuts in Ohio on page 4.)
Education
The reductions in state funding for K-12 education spending would have totaled $900 million in FY 2003. A reduction of this magnitude could have been accomplished in a number of ways.
- Ohio schools could have employed 15,272 fewer teachers in FY 2003. This would have raised the pupil-teacher ratio from 15.0 children per teacher to 17.2 children per teacher. The increase in the pupil-teacher ratio would move Ohio’s national ranking from 24th to 41st and move it from just above the national average to well below average. Pupil-teacher ratios would continue to rise in subsequent years, as the funding reductions required by the limit grow.
- Ohio could have closed school 12 days early to save the $900 million
in FY 2003. Again, fewer and fewer days of school would be affordable in future
years as the limit would continue to pinch funding.
Read the entire report
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Download Entire Report (.pdf)