[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

The reason you have so much revenue is *because* your taxes are so high. Actually, some of the highest. According to this ('04 report) http://www2.census.gov/govs/state/04rank.pdf , New York has the 4th highest per capita taxes.

New York taxes aside, according to the pdf, Michigan (rounding to account for inflation), has approximately 60-65 million dollars to spend. considering 65 million, thats 3% of the overall budget! Considering that perhaps 30% of all revenue (22 million)is spent on education, that's almost ten percent of the education budget! For the people trying to balance the education budget, a cool ten percent is an enticing place to save other programs.

I also have no doubt that Michigan is afraid to commit to such a large grant. This grant allows the teams money to start up for one year only. Think of all the people (understandably) trying to come back next year and ask again for the same amount or more! Education will not permanentely give up 10% of it's budget.

Again, the best bet for Michigan is to reduce that grant significantly. 250,000 will give about fourty teams the chance to start up and test the waters. It would even serve as a nice testbed to see if those teams could rope in enough sponsors to continue for the next year. Baby steps are what FIRST needs, not empty promises.

I think you are off by a factor of 1000 there - Michigan has approx 60-65 billion, not million. (The total amounts are in thousands, not single dollars). That throws your percentages off greatly (by a factor of 1000). Think about how little 60 million is in terms of the money a state would run on for a year, that would be like $6 a person in the state. I pay over 100 times that to the state of Mass in taxes, even though I'm not even a full time resident and only work part time.

Also, the taxes used for his school district expansion likely come from local town dollars (property taxes, etc), which are not represented in your link. (I'm pretty sure thats state taxes only, which likely counts for a small to zero percentage of what is spent on local town buildings). I do, however, agree with your argument vs his (the taxes being high somewhere means there is a lot more to spend on education etc, taxes being high doesn't make it much more expensive to run a town except that you have higher payroll to pay out).