Much of the focus on this blog has been about reaching out to win over young voters. However, in my hometown of Pittsburgh, recent developments are demonstrating exactly what happens when young voters don’t show up to the polls. As you may know, Pittsburgh’s economy has gone from its reliance upon the steel industry to becoming a world-class hub for high-tech industry, such as robotics, health care, nuclear engineering, and biomedical technology. These advances have been made possible by Pittsburgh’s world-class learning institutions, led by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

However, the government of the City of Pittsburgh, like those of many other cities across the country, has a $16.2 million hole in its 2010 operating budget.  Almost immediately after his reelection in November, Democratic Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (disclosure: I worked for Ravenstahl’s opponent) announced his previously undisclosed plan to make up for the missing revenue by imposing a tax on college students within the City of Pittsburgh.  The proposed tax will amount to 1% of the student’s yearly tuition, which would translate into approximately $130 for in-state students at the University of Pittsburgh, $230 for out-of-state students at the University of Pittsburgh, and as much as $400 for Carnegie Mellon students.

Of course, the presidents of each of the colleges in Pittsburgh denounced the tax, and as you would expect, so have many students who would be taxed.  The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed some of these students:

Jacob Brown, a University of Pittsburgh student, said he had earned $3,500 this year washing cars.

“I barely scrape by,” he said, adding that his out-of-state tuition is paid by scholarships and loans. The $233 he would have to pay if the tax were enacted “would be the better part of a month of rent,” he said, or a big slice out of his bottom-of-the-barrel food bill.

Ashley Kunkle, a Carlow student, said the tax would cost her $217. That’s close to one month’s payment on the $3,000 a year she pays the school after financial aid. The tax would apply to the total tuition bill regardless of whether it was paid for with scholarships.

“I make approximately $3,500 working two jobs,” she said. That “$217 means that I could abandon the city of Pittsburgh to study at other fine institutions where there is no tuition tax.”

Charles Shull, president of Pitt’s student government board, said he made “negative-$12,000 a year” because he takes out student loans that far exceed what he earns. “I pay rent. I pay property taxes. I pay wage taxes,” he said.

The final vote is set to take place tomorrow (Wednesday, December 2), and five of Pittsburgh’s nine members of city council have come out in favor of the tax. Thus, it seems likely that the tax will pass, despite promises from the universities to sue to invalidate it.

Let this entire debacle serve as a reminder to young voters across the country:  this is what you get when you don’t exercise your civic duty to vote. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette highlights this:

The voting districts in student-heavy central Oakland and North Oakland were busy in November 2008, logging participation rates of 48 percent to 70 percent. This year, though, with a mayor’s race at the top of the ballot, one of those same districts saw just 2.3 percent of registered voters come to the polls, while others were in the teens.

Worse, even after the announcement of the tax, student advocacy was almost non-existent, with only 137 students using outreach tools on a website designed to fight the tax:

After the mayor’s 2010 budget address featured the tax, student government leaders from nearly all of the city’s schools gathered at Pitt. CMU’s student government put up a Web site, www.stoptuitiontax.org. As of Wednesday, 2,543 different computer users had visited the site, 108 of those wrote e-mails to City Council, and 29 used it to report that they had called a council member.

Years upon years of a lack of participation by young voters has cemented into many politicians’ minds that they can get away with patently absurd ideas like Ravenstahl’s tuition tax.  The only way to change this is for young people to actually show up and vote.  If that doesn’t happen, then these young voters have no right to be appalled when they see their own economically struggling city impose its very own tuition tax.

Last 5 posts by Aaron Marks

• Onward and Upward: Building a Sustainable Majority - January 22nd, 2010
• The Youth Vote and the 2009 Elections - November 6th, 2009
• The Best of the Post-2009 Election Spin - November 5th, 2009
• Introducing NextGenGOP Executive Director James Kane - October 20th, 2009
• Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Iraq? - September 1st, 2009