Despite having many, many, MANY pictures of my cat in reserve to inundate people with, there can and will be times when I am moved to write about something much more serious. Though I suspect that by the end of this post, I might need such a picture to help make me feel better.
There we go.
Now, I attend graduate school at Oklahoma State University, and one of the pervading topics of discussion pretty much ever since I landed last week has been about the budget. For the uninitiated, Oklahoma's budget has been a test model of conservative thinking about how lowering taxes on businesses and industries would spur job growth, raising employment and reducing the need for public assistance programs etc.
In the weeks leading in to the holiday break, however, Oklahoma reported that state tax revenue was down 12 percent. At the time, Oklahoma Finance Secretary Preston Doerflinger (Which, I have to say, sounds like a name for a Bond villain,) laid the blame squarely on the fall of product prices in the oil and gas industry.
Because when has placing so much of your economy on the back of such a globally volatile industry ever worked out for this place?
Certainly, back during the heady days of $100+-a-barrel oil, Oklahoma's legislature and government was more than happy to cut corporate taxes to the Nth degree, despite repeated cuts to budgets of government programs and services. Services like education, law enforcement, corrections, and public assistance programs.
Now, with education set to take yet another blow for the team, this one threatens to be a knockout punch to school districts reeling from budget cuts to fund corporate tax cuts and breaks that have been piling up for years in a state dominated by borderline Tea Party politics. Though copies of the story are no longer available online, I remember reporting on tax cuts voted on by the people a few years back on the promise that it would bring more jobs by making Oklahoma a business-friendly state, and all it did was leave the local school district scraping for funds while being bonded out after building new or modernizing almost every facility in the district.
This cut, however, isn't something that's going to hit a year or two down the road. The State Board of Education recently approved a $46 million cut in funding for this fiscal year, ending June 30. This includes cuts to lunch assistance programs, staff development, and a complete elimination of STEM initiatives.
The fact that I rely on a government tuition waiver program to, you know, go to school and provide me with my job aside, I'm left to wonder when someone at the state house will realize that enough is enough. Oklahoma was lamenting the flight of its best and brightest to other states even back when I was a budding high school graduate (in the increasingly far-off year of 2002, no less). Even now, while many of the older generation laments millennials as lazy bastards who want everything handed to them, it seems that those in power have gone out of their way to protect their own interests, usually at the cost of a generation raised from birth to expect everything their parents had, despite the fact that, at minimum wage, working full time the entire summer would pay for less than 30% of the average undergrad's annual tuition, compared to 100% or greater 40 years ago.
So yes, let's continue treating education like our personal piggybank because we refuse to learn yesterday's lessons out of some politicized, near-dogmatic ideology. Sure, a high school diploma may barely qualify you to be a Sonic carhop these days, dropping the requirements of success on a generation finding it harder and harder to afford them, but hey.
As long as I get mine, right?