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Homeowners face another 10% tax hike
Real estate taxes double in seven years

Members of the Board and Dr. Dale:

Good evening. My name is Arthur Purves. I address you as president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.

Last April the school board representative from Sully District wrote to an FCTA board member that the proposed FY2006 budget increase was "a 2.0 percent increase over the current year’s budget estimate and is below the rate of inflation."

Now , a year later that alleged two percent or $50 million increase has become a 14 percent increase and the $50 million has become $254 million.

Can you be trusted?

This is an expensive school system. For decades your inflation-adjusted budget has been increasing nine times faster than enrollment. Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) staff has been increasing four times faster than enrollment. The Superintendent justifies this as the price of academic excellence and cites last year’s record-high SAT scores as evidence.

Why is it, however, that on page 39 of the 2006 Washington Area Boards of Education (WABE) Guide, FCPS is the only school district that does not report the percent of seniors taking the SAT (see below)? In 1997, 89 percent of FCPS seniors took the SATs. That had decreased to 79 percent in the 2005 WABE Guide. In the 2006 Guide, is FCPS trying to cover up an even greater decline in SAT participation?

FCPS claims to be the "Education Empire," the best in the nation. But is it the best in Virginia?

Schoolmatters.com, a school-rating website provided by Standard and Poors and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation identifies the top-performing school districts in each state. Their analysis considers both test scores and demographics and lists 16 top school districts in Virginia. Fairfax County is not one of them.

FCPS boasts that 89 percent of its graduates go on to post-secondary education. The school district, however, has no estimate of what percentage of its graduates earn four-year college degrees. The State Council for Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) reports that 68 percent of freshmen at four-year colleges will graduate within six years. SCHEV numbers suggest that 45 percent of freshmen at two-year colleges eventually earn four-year degrees.

Therefore it appears that while 90 percent of graduates go on to post-secondary education, under 60 percent of FCPS graduates will earn four-year college degrees. This analysis is posted on the FCTA website, www.fcta.org.

In conclusion, your claims of academic excellence are incomplete and do not justify the property tax hikes required to support your soaring budget.

Previous years’ testimony is posted on the FCTA website, www.fcta.org, under the "Testimony" link.

Distinguished Members of the General Assembly:

My name is Arthur Purves. I address you as president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.

There is no need to raise taxes for transportation.

Despite recent tax hikes and soaring tax revenues, state Senator John Chichester, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, tells us that we cannot divert existing taxes to transportation because most of these revenues are needed for public education, courts and prisons, and Medicaid, all of which are outpacing the growth of population and inflation.

What he does not say is that public school-spending has been increasing ten times faster than enrollment, even after adjusting for inflation. Public-school staff has been increasing seven times faster than enrollment. The result? According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, 65 percent of Virginia school children score below grade level.

Because of the public schools’ century-old hostility to phonics, low-income children do not learn to read, thus making them dependent of government welfare. Before the Civil War, it was illegal to teach a slave to read because the ability to read, it was thought, would empower an individual to be independent. Not much has changed. Slavery destroyed families at the auction block. Today welfare destroys families by incentivizing out-of-wedlock births with free housing, food, childcare, and healthcare. It is government schools and government welfare that turn our vulnerable youth into felons and feeds Virginia’s prison population, which is growing four times faster than overall population. Government has become the modern-day plantation.

High medical inflation is in part due to the government takeover of healthcare through Medicaid and, at the federal level, Medicare. These single-payer systems destroy market restraints, increase administrative costs, and encourage fraud. Their high cost is the major cause of the federal deficits, putting us at the mercy of the Japanese and Chinese, who are buying an increasing percentage of our debt.

Medicaid was supposed to provide long-term care to the poor, but with the right lawyer, well-to-do families can qualify.

We do support Medicaid funding for the disabled. However the overdue refurbishing of the state mental health system could have been funded long ago but for the excessive funding of government schools and welfare, which demand more taxes every year.

The problem of course is that no income taxes and almost no sales taxes are spent on transportation. Instead they fund the growing problems created by welfare, the government takeover of healthcare, and the education empire. The transportation solution is to acknowledge the damage caused by social spending and to let transportation compete against social spending for income taxes and all sales taxes.

Thank you.

Updated March 27, 2006