[swearwolf]

As an Oregonian, I think the reason it’s infamous is that Oregon schools are terrible and many people blame the kicker for taking surplus budget that could have been spent on schools and giving it back to the taxpayers instead. It also gets a fair amount of criticism for proportionally distributing funds based on how much a person paid in taxes, so the wealthiest get the most money back.

Can’t say how much the kicker really does impact these things, but I can say that when you compare state funded resources between California, Washington and Oregon, Oregon’s usually come out looking worse. For example, if you take a road trip up i5 from Los Angeles to Seattle, you’ll notice that the rest stops in Oregon are far worse than those in California or Washington. It does seem that there’s an austerity in Oregon absent in those two states, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s imposed by the requirement to send back the surplus.

[xyzzyz]

There is basically no significant correlation between school spending and performance. If anything, worse performing schools tend to be better funded on average. Thus, there is no reason to expect that increased school funding will translate to better performance. I hope that it makes you feel slightly better about the surplus tax not going to schools.

As for austerity, given the between-state variation, what money is spent on is way more important than how much of it is available. As it turns out, Oregon actually rakes in more money (per capita) in state and local taxes than Washington, so one should rather expect Washington to be the austere one. In fact, Oregon could send every resident a check for $1k every year, and still have 10% more money available per capita than Washington. That’s why I’m rather skeptical about governments claiming to need more money in order for X not to suck: first I want to hear an answer to “why X sucks less in state Y, which spends less money on X than you?”.