Georgia has a $14 billion surplus sitting in the bank. It is such a large surplus that it runs up against the law in terms of how large the surplus can be. Your property tax bill went up anyway. So now you're paying twice, and here's how that happens. You send income and sales taxes to the state every year, money meant to come back to your community. During the recession, the state cut its share of school funding to save money. The recession ended, the surplus grew, and the state never restored it. The cost didn't disappear. It landed on your county, which had one way to cover it: your property taxes. The state used to pay a significant majority of funding of school funding (Source: IDRA) . Over the last two decades the state has made significant cutbacks and shifted that burden towards local governments. Now it's approximately 49% locally-funded, 42% state-funded, and 9% federally-funded. You pay the state taxes, then you pay your county more in property taxes each year to cover what the state walked away from.

Lower Costs

• Break the cycle at the source: if the state uses the surplus it already has to fund its full share of schools, your county no longer has to raise property taxes to fill the gap.

• Your bill comes down without touching the income tax that pays for schools, roads, and healthcare in the first place.

Higher Standards

Georgia needs to restore its share of school funding before it asks your county for more. $14 billion collecting dust while your costs climb isn't fiscally conservative, like the Republican Party claims to be. It's fiscally negligent. The money the state is already taking isn't making it back to your community. The answer isn't to pay more. It's to make the dollars you already pay actually come home.

Six weeks for a doctor's appointment in one of the wealthiest zip codes in Georgia. Premiums climbing every year. Rural hospitals closing. Coverage denied after your own doctor said you needed it. Name another business where the technology improves every year and the price goes up anyway. That isn't an accident, and it isn't something we have to accept. The people stuck in the coverage gap aren't lazy. They're your server, the stylist who's cut your hair for ten years, the aide who sits with your mom. They earn too much to qualify for help and not enough to afford a plan on their own, and when more people are covered, prices come down for everyone.

On reproductive health: What a woman does with her body is between her and her doctor. If the people in power want to restrict that decision, then they owe every woman who carries a pregnancy the support necessary to raise that child: affordable healthcare, childcare she can actually qualify for, affordable food, and a public school system that's funded. You cannot demand one without providing the other.

Lower Costs

• When people can't afford care, they skip it until it's an emergency that they already can’t afford. Hospitals raise prices on the insured to cover the unpaid bills. Emergency care is also more expensive than preventive care.

• Close the coverage gap so people see a doctor early, and that cost-shifting stops driving up your premiums.

• Georgia is leaving federal money on the table: the federal government has offered to cover 90% of the cost to close the gap, essentially handing our own tax dollars back to us. Republicans in the legislature keep turning it down.

Higher Standards 

We should refuse to accept a system that takes more of your money every year and operates at a worse standard every year. A premium that climbs for worse coverage, a claim denied after a doctor's orders, a family one diagnosis from years of debt: that's the standard we're being asked to settle for, and we deserve better. Expanding Medicaid will have a positive impact on all Georgians, even residents that don’t use Medicaid.

Education here is under real strain. Kids can't read on grade level. Teachers are paid below the national average and still buy their own supplies. Daycare costs more than in-state college tuition. Class sizes continue growing while the state takes a bigger cut of our school funding every year. Georgia even cut its childcare assistance limit to the strictest in the country: a family of four earning more than about $37,000 now makes too much to qualify. How is a family making $37,000 supposed to put kids in daycare and still afford to put food on the table?

Lower Costs

• Childcare runs about $7,000 to $11,000 annually, and for many parents that math doesn't work, so one of them leaves a job to stay home. Bring that cost down and you keep two paychecks in the house.

• Every dollar spent before age five saves several down the road in remediation, special ed, and social costs. Investing early is how we stop costs from piling up later.

Higher Standards 

We should demand a state that funds the schools we already pay for instead of pulling more from them every year. The answer to struggling public schools was never to walk away from them. It's to fund them properly. Investing in early childhood leads to higher graduation rates, a stronger local workforce, safer communities, and lower costs for all of us.

The state should also support programs that provide afterschool, summer, and weekend programming across the state.

Right here in Fulton County, our schools are roughly $57 million in the red, cutting positions and closing buildings, while the state still requires us to send about $245 million of our local tax dollars back out for redistribution. It's called "Local Fair Share." Look it up! It doesn't look very fair from here.

What we're really protecting When public schools slide, some families who otherwise would stay, leave, and every family that leaves takes away school funding, which drags down home values and the community the rest of us count on. For every 1 dollar spent on public schools, your home value goes up an average of $20. Nobody moves to a community for its empty buildings and expensive private schools. They move for its public schools. That's what we're protecting.

An educated citizenry is the key to democracy. And right now, it's being treated like an expense to cut instead of the foundation it is.

The taxes you pay are supposed to come back to your community as services and infrastructure. So why are schools still underfunded? Why is your insurance still climbing? Why do commute times keep growing? Why does a permit take months? Better yet: why is it that when you call a government agency, if you're lucky enough to get a live person on the line, you get transferred four times and have to start the story over every time?

And the programs that do get funded: is anyone checking whether they actually help our families? Meanwhile the state hands a $2.5 billion tax break to data centers owned by some of the richest companies on earth, money that could have come back to your schools and your streets. This isn't a money problem. It's a priorities problem. The state has the dollars. It's choosing data centers over your kids' classrooms, and tax breaks over your commute.

Lower Costs

Right now nobody's watching the money, so the road that's been "under construction" for three years and the budget that keeps ballooning just become your problem.

Real oversight catches that early, so you're not paying for the work and then paying again to fix what should've been done right the first time.

Dollars go missing between the taxes you pay and the results you get, because nobody's tracking them. Oversight is how you find them again.

Higher Standards

Accountability isn't elimination. It's making sure your money does what it was meant to. Public dollars, public results, public scoreboard. If we said we'd do it, did we do it? Did the money we spent make your life better?

We should demand a government that can answer those questions, and one that puts your family first: your schools, your roads, your safety, before billion-dollar favors for the richest companies on earth. Because a budget is a list of priorities, and right now, you're not on it. You do everything right: pay your taxes, follow the rules. In return, the government is supposed to work for you, not renew programs nobody checks while your street waits to be fixed.