McIlheran doesn't read the paper he works for

Last Sunday, I laid into Patrick McIlheran, who is allowed to befoul the Milwaukee paper's "Crossroads" section every Sunday, for being a liar in his column on Social Security. (Note that the paper did not print the letter I submitted.)

This week, I'm not going to call him a liar, since I cannot find any outright falsehoods in his column. (I will point out that he is being misleading when he says that Wisconsin's tax burden in the fifth highest nationally; see the IWF.) Instead, I'm going to call him hacktacularly stoopid--that's right, stoopid with two o's, so you know I'm serious.

Before I explain why, let me just cite a little bit of the column so you know where I'm coming from:

Wisconsin's taxes are high. [. . .] We didn't reach this condition solely or even primarily by waste, fraud and abuse. That's why Muskego-Norway, while interesting, is not the issue. Racine is.

On April 5, the Racine Unified School District asked voters whether it could take in more money than state law allows, $8.9 million more for two years. Voters said no [. . .. In this, we see several reasons our taxes are high.

One is ceaseless demand. The district was seeking an extension of power voters had granted it a year before, not to fund extraordinary costs but for operating expenses. The district's one-more-chance to prove its frugality has long since passed: It has asked 15 times since the state leashed schools' appetites in 1993; voters agreed eight times. [. . .]

District officials talk of how they're constantly cutting, but the fact is that Racine's school spending rises every year even as enrollment does not. The district spent $166.7 million in 1997-'98; it is spending $252.7 million this year. Even after inflation, that's an average yearly increase of more than 4%, far higher than incomes.

That's not evidence of wastefulness. It's a sign that taxpayers must look critically at even legitimate spending.

Critics note that Racine teachers have a generous health care plan. Do teachers deserve good benefits? Sure. Do they deserve benefits exactly this good? I don't know.

First of all, McIlheran here is being a hack because not only is he treading ground that Mark Belling has utterly worn out, he's doing it with barely a fraction of the flair. I mean, consider the wuss-out at the end: He lacks the nerve to come right out and say what he and the ditto-heads bobbing along as they read are really thinking about, and that's all-out union-bashing.

It's also a pretty hacktacular piece because if he bothered to read the paper that he nominally works for, he wouldn't be sputtering the lame cliches. The news stories in the paper--much more likely to be built around facts than McIlheran's tired conservative whining--tell accurately the story of why Racine is in the trouble it's in. Let's start with something from just two weeks ago:

[Wisconsin's revenue] caps [. . .] "penalized prudence." Because Racine Unified was a low-spending district, the caps froze the district's budget at a lower number than other districts.

While each school district can add to its budget on a regular basis--the allowable increase this year was about $230 per student across the state--costs are increasing more quickly than revenue caps, he said. A higher spending district can more easily absorb the increasing costs, he added.

And what kind of increasing costs are we talking about? Well, remember that Racine is a lot like Milwuakee in the number of special education students and English Language Learners, not to mention students getting free and reduced lunch, the best measure of a district's poor students. All of these things make educating Racine's kids more expensive than average.

Is that all? Of course not! All McIlheran needed to do was dig a little deeper into the paper's archives, back to October, and an article entitled "School health costs affect pay":

Between 2002-'03 and 2003-'04, school districts in the seven-county Milwaukee area budgeted only 0.02% more for employee salaries at a time when the total amount for employee benefits rose by more than 8%, according to a report by the Public Policy Forum that's due out today.

"Employee benefits, especially the health care costs, are the key driver in municipal/ public school financing," said Jeffrey Browne, president of the forum, a non-partisan group that studies local government issues. "So what you have is relatively less resources going where we want them to go, which is into the classrooms." [. . .]

In Milwaukee Public Schools, which eliminated more than 600 positions during the period studied, the amount budgeted for salaries decreased by 3.4% even as money set aside for benefits rose by more than 8%. [. . .]

Some employees, in fact, are making a conscious decision to sacrifice wage increases for medical coverage, said Robert Stepien, executive director of business services for the Racine Unified School District.

Aha! So one problem is health care costs in the district, certainly not those greedy bastards' salaries. Clearly, we need to soak teachers on their health insurance, too, because that's much easier than recognizing that we have a bit of a crisis here in the Milwaukee area. What's that, you say? Your reading of McIlheran didn't suggest that there was any kind of wide-spread problem? Well, that could be because he never read that article from March noting that our costs are 27% above the Midwest's average. He also missed last summer's big sudy showing that Milwaukee had 68% higher hospital costs than the national average, among many other abysmal findings.

Hell, this week Russ Feingold wrote in the paper,

[T]he United States spends $5,670 per capita annually on health care, twice as much as any other industrialized country. Despite this spending, we are not healthier than other countries, and we still have tens of millions of Americans who lack insurance and countless others who remain underinsured.

Our expensive, inefficient health care system takes a staggering toll on American families and businesses.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for family coverage rose 59% from 2000 to 2004, compared to inflation growth of 9.7% and wage growth of 12.3%. The burden is just as devastating on businesses. On average, the cost to an employer of a family comprehensive coverage premium is $800 per month, close to the monthly minimum wage rate of $893 per month.

With costs going up every year, employers often have no choice but to shift much of the cost of health care to their employees, abandon health benefits to employees or eliminate positions.

Huh. Sounds to me like what's happening in Racine (and at many other school districts around the state, including mine) is no different than what's happening nationally and locally in the private sector. If McIlheran actually cared about you, me, or anything other than scoring easy points with lazy, recycled anti-public-school talking points, he would pick up on the health care angle and demand true reform. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If the state legislature had addressed the costs of health care a decade ago instead of capping school districts' revenue, districts would be solvent and all citizens of the state would have more money in their pockets due to lower health care costs. But the legislature, like McIlheran, found it easier to dump on schools.

What a hack.