Funding Our Education

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Today, we discuss the funding of our public schools here in Massachusetts, the student opportunity act, how inflation has impacted schools, and the expiry of federal Covid-19 funds for schools. We are joined by experts from Mass Budget and Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance to examine this issue as analysts, advocates, and invested parents.

Vatsady Sivongxay from Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance and Colin Jones from Mass Budget join Jordan Berg Powers and Jonathan Cohn in our latest episode. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 52. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Okay, we're recording. Welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics.

We investigate why it's broken. Imagine what we could have in Massachusetts if we fix it and report about how you can get involved. Before I go into our guests and our discussion for today, I will introduce myself and co host for today's episode, Jordan Berg Powers.

Jordan, if you want to introduce yourself first. Yeah. Jordan Berg Powers.

He him. And I am a former executive director of politics and policy and training in Massachusetts, and I am a parent of a Worcester public school kid. And so today's discussion very much hit home.

Awesome. And then Jonathan Cohn, he him joining from Boston. I've been active in issue and electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts for over a decade, which is always wild to say Anna's not able to join this episode.

Maybe someday you'll have all three of us on at the same time. But to kind of lead into our discussion for today before I hand it over to our two guests. So school districts across Massachusetts have been preparing for layoffs of teachers and have been support staff kind of cuts to vital after school programs and more.

And this problem hasn't come out of nowhere. It's something that's been known about for a little while now, but with the characteristic in action that we tend to see at the state house. So diving into this, what the problem is,the roots of it, what can be done? We're delighted to have Colin Jones from Mass Budget and Vatsady Sivongxay from the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance.

Colin and Vatsady that you can just take a quick, take a minute to introduce yourselves. Yes. Colin Jones.

I'm the deputy policy director and senior analyst for education at the Mass Budget Policy center, and I've been there doing research work and policy advocacy work since 2014. Hi, everyone. I'm Vatsady Sivongxay.

I'm the executive director of MEJA, the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance. I am also a parent of a public school kiddo who just finished third grade this week. So exciting times for all of us.

And I appreciate sending all my appreciation to Jonathan and Jordan for inviting Colin and I. Happy to do so. One Thing that might kick us off with if this works is for people who pay attention to issues around education funding in the state might have been aware that several years ago, back in 2019, the state House updated the funding formula for public school restrictions, something that they hadn't done since the early nineties. And that was long overdue, a multi step process of them having a commission and then pretending not to care about their commission and finally, eventually doing so.

But can you tell us a little bit about what was the student opportunity act and what were the changes, state funding for public schools that were passed a few years ago to set the scene for the discussion so I could jump in and just give just a broad overview of what the student Opportunity act was in our fight for changes. So, you know, just to note, tens of thousands of students and union members worked really, really hard to fix the funding formula, which Colin will share a little bit about chapter 70. So that determined, like, how each student–How much each student would receive at their schools for them to learn. And as you had shared, it was so outdated. So it meant that, like, our schools just weren't getting the fundings necessary for our students to succeed.

And that's, like, resources, right? Resources. That's, like, teachers, librarians, other key support staff, you know,even, like, libraries. Right.

Healthcare services. So all of that was, like, there was no enough money for it, so there was a need to update that formula. And in 2019, Governor Baker signed this historic landmark bill that was passed at the state house.

So everyone celebrated, but then Covid hit right, and then that's when, you know, we're facing what we're talking about today. So let's. Let's actually talk about what are we.

What are we facing today? Like, what is the problem that brought you all here? So, yeah, so, I mean, we, you know, the year that's about to conclude or the school year they just wrapped up was the third year of the student Opportunity act. So it's a six year plan that was knocked off track in its first year by Covid. But then we really fought to make sure they didn't extend that window out further.

So there was year three of the student Opportunity act, and it was also. This is also the year when pretty much all of the COVID funding that districts have been getting, which is in the billions, so was starting to run out. So you had those two things going on.

So you had funding about to expire from the federal government. You had an all off a cliff. It just goes away immediately, all at once, basically, after the three years of support.

And then you have this state plan that's coming in steady bits, but not enough to really overcome that dip that's going to happen. And then you also have. The other factor to keep in mind is we've had the greatest inflation levels since, like, the seventies.

Over the last 40 years, this is the most inflation you've ever had. So we've all noticed, of course, is just in our daily lives. When we go out shopping, the cost of everything.

But that is affecting schools as well. And so when we had, particularly the 2022 to 2023 school years, we had this inflation levels that we had not seen since the seventies. And the reforms that we talked about, they just didn't factor that in.

They said even if inflation is seven or eight points in the economy, based on the existing status quo, we can only give you 4.5% increases every single year. And so that gap was about six points.

And when you have a large school funding formula that has over $6 billion in it, if you underinflate it, if you don't account for cost growth, it becomes a really, really big problem. And so that is the main issue. It's like we have a great reform plan that is being phased in, that is doing a lot of it on what it's supposed to be doing.

But we also have, um, inflation we haven't seen in 40 years, and, um, the COVID support from the federal government going away. Yeah. So, like, just in layman terms, like, they thought inflation was pretty steady.

So if they're increasing funding by 4% every year, even with a little bit of inflation, that's still going to do what we wanted, which is more money for our schools. But if you have inflation, that's 7%, and you're. And you're just set this, like, we're going to step up the amount of money that goes to our schools, and voila, we have this.

It goes way over. That's not actually an increase, that's a decrease, and it's still more money, and it's doing really good things. But we need them to take into account that inflation happened so that the full effect, the vision that they themselves are proud of for more funding for schools, for that to be realized, they need to step up and make sure that they fill in some gaps based on what's left from inflation.

And that's really what we're asking. But it's also, I think it's an important, because there's real effect of all these things, which is on our schools. It means that school programs are being cut, teachers are being fired.

In my school district in Worcester, we lost 163 positions because of the combination. It's like this perfect storm of federal funds falling off a cliff. So we no longer have that money.

And also, now this, like, is not filling. It's not as growing as much as it needs to to fill in this moment. Uh, Vatsady, I Know you, like you have kids in school.

So I'd love for you to talk also about some of the programs and teachers, what is, like, I think it's really important that people get a sense of, what does it look like for the state, especially from, in terms of education justice, what's happening in the state around with the lack of money. Yeah. So to take a step back.

Right. The fight that we were fighting for was the promise to fully fund our schools. So when the governor and legislator made that promise in 2019, that was really to ensure that our most impacted districts received those funding.

So if we take a look at what resources we were thinking of at that time, it hasn't changed that much. Librarians like Ed mentioned after school programs for parents, like for single parent households, immigrant, low income families, those afterschool programs are key. Our special education students with IEP, students who are also,English is their second language, the support staff that's really critical in order for them to continue growth in our public schools are necessary.

So that's what we're looking at. In addition to our educators, the people who are, you know, that are being cut are folks who care deeply about our students. But also, if we look a little bit deeper, as the superintendent Worcestor had mentioned last week, there are folks, there are teachers who have worked so hard in the last, like, you know, less than three years that they've been at school teaching.

Young teachers who worked really hard are now being cut. I think when we look at who's being most affected, it's our most impacted families and students with disability, english learners, low income families and our staff who really need that health care and really need the income coming into you, their family and their homes. So I think what we can definitely, I think it's definitely important to talk about this, but in practice, and I've talked to school district administrators and staff and superintendents and people that are in charge of trying to balance the books of school districts every single year.

And what's happening is they face what the costs really are. Right. So when they're out, like getting hired vendors, getting stuff done on their h vac, getting stuff done in their buildings, upgrading their technology,building new classrooms, and then which most of what they spend on is personnel, trying to attract staff andkeep staff, they can't say, oh, sorry.

The state rule says we only get four and a half percent increase. They have to actually deal with what is really happening out there. And that's where the gap is going on.

And so it steers into some of the inequalities that we were trying to address with the student Opportunity act. Right. So if you're written, I mean, this is school funding in America writ large, right? We're one of the only advanced countries that says how much your schools get depends on how wealthy the underlying area is.

So it's inherently regressive. And so, you know, when you, when you have something like this, you have inflation that you don't address. It's going to be, it's going to be highly inequitable in how it falls on districts, even though everyone's really struggling with it.

And so instead of, and as we mentioned, we've known that inflation is really, really high for years at this point. So we at Mass Budget just released a report last week that sort of said, hey, what if we, the last two years, inflation that were missed, like we can't get that back in the past. We can't go back and fix it retroactively.

But what if we dealt with it right now in the school funding the districts are going to get this year so that they can better manage the situation. So what we found was, first of all, the student Opportunity act itself is working in a large way. Nearly $100 million of school funding is going out across the state in a very progressive way to our communities that serve the most black and brown low income students.

However, if we had fixed, if we fixed inflation, we'd add over $450 million to school funding this year and that would be highly progressive. So I know we have, Worcestor had been, has come up a lot because when we run these numbers, we said, okay, we didn't give you proper inflation in the last two years. Lets correct that.

We've got $26 million that simulation. And so thats more than their budget gap right now. They would go to a surplus at this point.

And so this is really impactful. And were obviously, we have that available. The reports out there were getting the word out.

But then the really interesting question is how do we get policymakers to actually act on that and not like knowing that 160 positions have been cut in the city of Worcester. The effects are happening now. So I'm not very satisfied to wait two or three years to solve it.

Yeah. And so. Oh, Jonathan, you go.

No, you go first. No, I've talked a lot. You go, okay.

My quick thing that I always like underscoring, and it's a point that, Jordan, I think that you often make well, about when you don't account for inflation, that you are ultimately making cuts, is that just on the most, like basic oversimplified level that if something costs you $100, if it now costs you $108 to get the same bundle of goods,that it costs you $100. If you're being told, well, only if you were told before, that will only top you up. That will top you up to the 100.

And you're being told that we'll only top you up to the 104.8 as opposed to 108. By virtue of basic math, that means that you start off with a gap regardless of anything else kind of changing.

There is a gap. There is something unfunded that you need to either find some funding for and that becomes even worse if you then have 108 to just do the same thing that you were doing before, you're being promised that you will only be kept to 104.8. And let's say, I'm just throwing around numbers.

This isn't, let's say, the actual amount of federal dollars missing. Somebody says, actually we're not putting up $15 anymore. So you're missing that, too.

So that it kind of shows in the way in which that all ends up leading to concrete cuts. If you're not actually accounting for how much you need to raise pay to account for inflation, the cost of like any items in a school,because a school is like, if you think about a school as being just both a combination of people and all of the items that exist in a school that need to come from somewhere, if you are getting books, if you're getting tables,if you're getting chairs, if you're replacing those tables and chairs at some point so that they're not there forever,you're buying supplies for a gym class, you're making sure that students are getting fed. All of that costs money and all of those costs go up.

Yeah. And I think I chime in here, is that the cost of inflation? We know in our daily lives that is just ridiculously high. We all know that, right? We don't have to have children in school.

We don't. Everybody is impacted or everybody knows that inflation has caused some for us to pay more on a lot of things. But what we see here is that districts, your zip code now continues.

Well, now, but it continues to deter your opportunity. So districts like in Cambridge, like in Wellesley and Melrose, they have the money to fill that gap that Jonathan said. Right.

Johnson but like Worcester, Springfield, Chelsea, Lynn, Revere. Right. Those are districts that don't have that extra additional funds, the property taxes that will come in to fill that gap.

So I think it's really important to talk about, like, what are some of the priorities? So obviously, the tax cuts, which we've talked a lot about on this year since it's the only real piece of legislation that the legislature passed in 2023and still continues to be basically the thing it passed this year and it's in its full term, the estate tax from thegovernor's own estimates will cost about $128 million this year. And the, the sort of tax cut for day traders,millionaire day traders is going to cost us about $42 million this year. So that gets us, you know, all, it gets us part of the way there.

So when you're talking about like where, what are the things we could do to fix this problem? Like just going back to the tax code that we had before they passed these tax cuts that they could not afford, we, you know,could help solve a lot of these problems in 2027, when these fully get realized, they're going to cost between that and single sales factor sales tax, which are all regressive, it's going to cost us about $347 million, if not more, in lost revenue, money that we could be spending to help fill these gaps for our kids. And this is a problem that they've known about. This is a known issue.

They have known about it for at least the last year and have continued to say we will not raise taxes. So they, andagain, it's not even like we're asking them to like create new taxes or like do the thing that they refuse to do,which is tax millionaire. So we had to do it for them.

Right? Like, we're not asking them to do those things. We're saying, like, just go back, just undo the harm you did with these, with the regressive parts to your tax package, the parts that just service a very tiny percentage of people in this state, just go back and fix those and we could help fill some of those gaps in. And they're just like,no, no, we're not going to do that.

The other piece I'd love to, Colin, I know you've raised is also can you talk about the sort of increased revenue,the millionaire's tax, and just a little bit about how you've been raising this issue for them, that they know that this is coming and that there is actually more money from the millionaire's tax than we had expected and so they could also use some of those funds to fill in that gap, if not close it. Yeah, I think it's always very important. Like,you know, like if we believe that, you know, there's many things we need to invest more in, in transit, education,housing, like across the board.

And those are always going to have to be put in relief with some of the tax policy decisions that have been made. And I think it's, you know, looking back, you know, we really could have used that, you know, 300 plus million that was, went in regressive tax cuts this year. We could have really used that for a number of things.

One, not having to do mid-year cuts in the budget. We did mid year cuts to the fiscal 24 budget, which is just,again, just really just pull services right out from under people. And we made the case at the time like what? Like please explain why tax cuts for people who hold stocks and assets for less than a year and are doing day trading and whatever is worthy of more support.

Why is it that estates over a million to $2 million who are passing wealth down to other generations with already the massive wealth inequality we already have, why that is of greater priority than housing programs, education programs? And as you have all noted, we did not get a very good answer, just sort of vaguely saying like, oh, it's good for competitiveness. Well, you know what's also good for competitiveness? Having amazing schools and having transit that works and having roads and bridges in good shape. And so I think that it has not aged particularly well looking back at that.

And it's something we have to remember as we, you know, like it's, a, we're going to continue to push for progressive taxes and that's because progressive taxes are working. We've found in the first year of the full year of the fair share millionaire surtax, we brought in $1.8 billion, according to the most recent estimates in fair share taxes on millionaires, which is telling us, a, it's working and b, the whole stuff about, oh, people are going to leave high wealth, high network, people are going to uproot their entire lives and high value networks and leave the state because we've changed tax policy in a marginal way of adding another cent on a dollar, $0.04 on a dollar in taxes that has not borne out. And so I think we have to be very clear that it's working. And then all of the critiques about how this is going to cause the state to collapse and so on and just have not borne out.

And so, but that does lead to actually some practical, positive things, right? Because like, yes, I wish we could have the 300 plus million back from the progressive tax cuts, but, but we do have this opportunity now and many of us mass budget and raise up Massachusetts a number of organizations are asking the legislature because in year one, if you're 800 million more than you expected in a revenue source, please upgrade your expectations of what we're going to get in future years. And so that's actively ongoing. There's a little bit of complexity with some of the money that's been more than we expected has limits on how it can be used, and some of those limits have to do with continuing to pad the state savings account, the Randy day fund.

But I would say the state's rainy day fund is at historically high levels. And so if we have immediate needs, if we have hundreds of teachers being cut, we have the transit issues that we are really facing. We have a housing crisis on our hands.

Now is a great time to use those resources. Do not sit on those resources just to say we have them. We really need to use them.

I always like to jokingly describe the legislature's attitude to the rainy day fund as to my attitude when I have an umbrella in my backpack and it's raining and it's raining harder and harder, and I refuse to take out the umbrella from my backpack because that requires, like, a little bit of work for me. That's what they do all of the time. It's what they do as a talk before, during COVID when they didn't want to dip into the rainy day fund, that the whole purpose of a rainy day fund is to have it.

When you have big. When you have big problems that you could dip into it and use it, you don't get credit. Like,you don't get a gold star for having a pot of money that sits there that you never actually use, even when there's a problem.

Yeah. And it's not. And it's.

We're already. The. The thing that's so ironic is that on one side of it, they'll say, we need the money because, um.

Because for our rating. But on the other side of it, they will increase bond bills, which are. Which are.

Which is basically a credit card thing. So on one side of it, they're like, let's just increase our. Let's increase the amount of money we're willing to spend on a credit card bill, which actually will affect our bond rating because we can't bond, we can't take out loans on all the things that they refuse to spend money on or refuse to raise taxes to spend money on.

So that's essentially so, like, you can balloon. You know, they'll balloon a housing bill with a bunch of stuff that they will never get spent like, it could be $300 billion. It won't matter.

Ultimately, the governor, the governor's not going to spend that money because that would totally destroy our bot rating. So they do these things which is just like, just for show, right? Just like this thing, the bond, the housing bill, you know, take gunning out of any of real things and keeping in sort of things. Right.

And like it's the same thing with the, with the, with this, with the fund. Like they didn't use the rainy day fund whenwe had a hundred year old pandemic. They were just like, well, we can't dip into it.

It will hurt our bot rating. Like when then do you dip it to it? If not when we have a pandemic. They barely dipped into it.

Finally, after loads of pressure and then it just, but it's, it's already got recouped that. And ballooned. And it's just like we can use some of these monies for the things we need today and still be fiscally responsible.

I would argue that having sensible taxation to pay for things rather than collect than credit card debt is actually more fiscally responsible than never raising taxes. Not having things go well, having people leave the state because they can't afford to live here and then continuing to max out a crack part. Like that's actually fiscally irresponsible, but that's what they're doing.

And so I just think it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's really troubling and it has a real world effect. Like my daughter is, is losing a teacher like that for no reason except, like, we could fix this problem. Like, she doesn't need to lose a teacher in her classroom.

Your child does not need to lose a teacher in their classroom. Your child does not need to lose that after school program. Your child does not need to have teachers going on strike because they need, because they want a 1%increase when, when inflation is rising way more than that because the school districts can't afford it, because the state won't put money into it because they're refusing to do simple things like go back to the same estate tax,go back to the same tax on day traders, use the money that we've brought in from the millionaire's tax.

Right? Like they won't do sensible things. You know, stop sending money to, extra money to the rainy day fund when we can use it right now. Right? Like just simple things like that come at a cost.

And it's frustrating. Jonathan, I would love for you to talk about, like, what have we gotten with the trifecta? Sothis is something that I was trying to figure out earlier, and I would love for anybody who has kind of more concrete examples to provide them. But so message us, obviously has had, who must have got a democratic trifecta.

For the first time since the deval Patrick administration in the last election, we've had large democratic control. We have more than 80% in both House and Senate. And out of curiosity, we have had democratic control of both chambers since Eisenhower was president.

And I was trying to think of what have we actually had this session? And it's been a fairly unproductive session.That is something that could not have happened previously. That is a concrete result of a democratic trifecta being able to reshape the possibility of the legislature.

And there are concrete things that I think are improvements of a democratic governor and the executive versus a republican and the executive, and ways in which I think Healey is a better executive than Baker as an executive.But when it comes to the legislative process, the only thing I could think of that the legislature passed this session that they wouldn't have passed before is literally the cut to the capital gains tax that they rejected underBaker. But then when Healey proposed, it said, well, we need to give her a win.

And it's pretty remarkable how many issues, and I feel like the school funding issue just kind of adds to the kind of the growing list of items of problems where it's even just committing to things that they've already committed to fundamentally that they aren't doing, let alone changing the, like changing the horizon of what is possible when you have a democratic trifecta. And they're trying to prove why that's something that other states should want to have and that the country as a whole should want to have because of what it can do for people. Yep.

Some of the funds that came from our hard work for fair share right now, it's getting closer at the 2 billion mark. Right.

So there's definitely additional funds there. But this year, what the additional funds meant for our k through twelve students was free lunches. Right.

For our higher ed students, it's like a step towards debt free college, beginning with the tuition free community college. So those are, I would say, like the trifecta, the Massachusetts legislator and governor here, although I Like to give credit to the public for winning fair share rather than legislature. Oh, no, no, no.

I like to pay that for us. Yeah, yeah. No, no, we fought for that.

Right. But yes, we won that and so it's their spending money that they have to spend because we got them the money and told them that they have to spend it certain ways. Yeah.

But now we have to ask for them to meet the promise. Right. Because if we really invest in our communities,right.

If they're really, really about the bond, if they're really concerned about folks leaving Massachusetts, then they have to invest in our k through twelve students because they're 91% of our student population, 90%. So, like, if you're, if you're thinking about investment, I mean, that's a no brainer. So we have to push these key decision makers to really think smart, you know, to really fix this inflation, because there is an opportunity here.

It's, it's up to them to do it. But I think. Yeah.

Colin, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I think there is. Yeah. I mean, I'll start with a little bit more of the shortcomings, but then hopefully end in an optimistic way.

I mean, we so far, like we've alerted the legislature, this is an issue. We've seen really tough override fights in some communities. We've seen budget cuts in other communities.

We saw a district shut down for twelve days because of a strike, which, again, just, you needed the resources to run the programs in Newton, in that case to keep things going, and then it couldn't work. So, so we've let everyone know this is an issue. It's not the only one.

And like, even the things that Vatsady just mentioned, like they're in conference right now, I don't know if community college will be free next year because the Senate was 100 million more on higher ed than the Housewas. So that's something where it's very practical. If we don't use the revenue that we know we have, like we know that we have, we'll have hundreds of millions of more than we've anticipated for fair share if we choose not to use it and just sit on it and then say, oh, well, pad reserves, that's going to mean like an actual thing for students and what they'll have to pay and it's not sure how it's going to go.

And so I think that's where like, just to, you know, in the way that I think about budgeting, spending less than, you know, knowingly spending hundreds of millions less than, you know, you have is not budgeting correctly. It is budgeting incorrectly. It is the opposite problem of overspending.

But underspending is not, is not effective budgeting when you know that it's going to have this impact on students around the state. So I think, yeah, I think we do have to expect a higher standard and progressive taxes are working. Please let them work to their full extent by not sitting on it.

And that's an ongoing conversation that we would need the support of people from around the state to continue to push to get the k twelve inflation funding, get the higher ed affordability pieces, get childcare access. And That's just education. There's a number of other things to we can own the mantle of.

We're being smart and we're using the resources we have and we're managing the state's fiscal position, but we're also doing what we have to do and showing that this is the way we should do things and this is what progressive governance actually looks like. And there's more we have to do. No, I really appreciate that because it's pushing back against kind of the scarcity mindset that so often dominates the legislature about we can only do so many things or we can only spend so much on something when we have the resources.

We have resources that we. That exist that they won't tap into. And we already have as a state with a lot of, with a lot of wealth, have the ability also to kind of garner more resources if we need to garner more resources to meet basic needs of people across the state.

But I think she will probably kind of wrap up. So, Colin and Vatsady, final, final takeaways. And Jordan, final takeaways.

Yeah, I think for me it's just that there's. There's a huge reason, an important reason to invest in our students and schools. Right.

We have the money, the decision is there in conference. They really have no reason to say anything else. But.

Yes, Colin? Yeah, not too much to add. It just, you know, we're seeing the harms that are happening to schools now, and we have the tools, we have the ability to address it. And, you know, it's going to take, you know, in the conversations I've had with, um, I think that some of the districts that are most affected, and I should really make sure that we get to this.

Like, the districts who would be helped the most are the districts who would need it. Springfield, Worcester,Bedford. Um, you know, so, you know, they're starting to understand, they're starting to see this and so let's, um,let's.

Let's get it. And it can be. It's not an all or nothing deal.

We could get half of it done in the next year and that would be a huge victory. So let's, um, let's get it done. Yeah.

I'll just say really quickly that it's just frustrating that this is not, you know, it just seemed like, I just think this is, it does not need to be this way. Like, these are not, these are, we're not, you know, I think a lot of the times, the way that the, we get talked about that a lot of these reforms get talked about as just like, oh, pie in the sky leftists,bonkers. But, like, we're very much tethered to the realities of, like, there is a real effect.

Like the way that the, the press covers Beacon Hill. It's just like, oh, like, oh, you know, there's just like, money here and things there and, oh, and the insiders and delete. But, like, my daughter's losing a teacher.

That's a real effect to the policies. Those are consequences, and they're not far flung consequences. They are direct consequences to inaction and action of our legislature.

And it need not happen because the fixes are just so simple. The fixes are not radical legislation. We're not talking about, like some sort of like, socialist utopia, which is often how it gets characterized.

You know, the people who are extremists, the chambers, the, these like, tax fairness groups, they're extremists.They don't believe in any taxation and any spending, and they oppose all of these things. And they get, they get pitted against those of us who are asking for just basic ideas of governance, basic ideas of fiscal responsibility.

Right. You, most, you raise the money you need to spend. You spend it on the things that are priorities for our state.

Investing in young people, investing in our education, investing in transportation, making the place more affordable. And you don't give giveaways to people who don't need money. You don't spend lots of money on people who aren't asking for it and don't need it.

And so, like, that's, you know, it's fiscally irresponsible to pretend to be legislating housing policy by blowing up a bond, by blowing up a credit card debt limit that you'll never spend and pretending that you're doing things that's fiscally irresponsible. What is fiscally responsible is to use money that is being raised to spend it on the things that people have indicated they'd like it to spend it on in reasonable ways that really are just with keeping things the way, like keeping the trajectory, which was slow and steady, not fast paced change. Right.

We were talking about slow and steady investments in our schools to bring them to where they could and should be. That's all we're saying. Right.

Instead, we're going backwards. We're losing 163 teachers at Worcester. We're losing teachers in every school district.

We're losing after school programs. That does not need to happen. There are really simple fixes.

Do what you were doing. Fix some of the things, address the realities that inflation is real and we can do this. And It's just frustrating that that sort of simple stewardship, financial adulthood that we're asking the legislature to engage in is, is treated as sort of some extremists of other things.

And it's just frustrating because what we need is we need them to grow up and act like adults and starts legislating like adults and fixing these things that are here that we can do in really simple, thoughtful ways, that are just really small fixes in the grand scheme of things but have big effect on real people's lives. Yeah. Jonathan, my final comments will be kind of, I'll underscore what other people have already said and said.

So much of this ends up being requiring the legislature to commit to things that they've either already passed or have vocally given, like vocally said that they support in some way or another and to then actually, like, do the things that they commit to. One thing that I really appreciated, there was an interview recently in the New YorkTimes with Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, who, when asked about the interviewer, about how when Democrats got a trifecta in Michigan, that they passed a number of things. And Whitmer said, well, my general approach is that if I campaign on something and I win, I should do it.

And I thought that that was a very refreshing attitude to hear about, the kind of following through on promises made final takeaway that we always forget to do. We have people who do great work on this podcast, behind the scenes with the video production, with social media, et cetera. Please donate to us.

Your small sums of money can go a long way. Budgeting a small amount each week, each month, each year to have the podcast is part of financial adulthood. To use Jordan's ham, good fiscal decision for you that can be budgeted.

It doesn't require much money and can do good work. But with that, thank you, Vatsady and Colin, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for being here.

It's a supporting conversation. Thanks, John. Thanks, Jordan