When Governor Jan Brewer announced her proposed budget, she called for the termination of a state program that currently serves 17,400 seriously mentally ill adults to save $37 million, the Arizona Republic reported. The governor’s budget chief, John Arnold, said this spending reduction is especially hard for the governor because she has been a strong advocate for mental health causes.

“That benchmark means that anyone who seeks more funding from the state must first make the case why the cause is more important than providing services to 17,400 mentally-ill adults,” Arnold told the Republic.

Arizona is spending far more money than it is bringing in, and difficult choices must be made. The concept of establishing a benchmark to justify spending is therefore a good one. The question is, should we continue to spend money on items that are nowhere near as worthy as services to the mentally ill?

Arizona has lost more than 300,000 private-sector jobs since the economic downturn began. On May 18, voters will decide whether or not to place an additional burden on the battered private economy by increasing the state sales tax by 18 percent. Proponents claim that voters should support the tax increase to “save education,” but the facts show that there is a great deal of waste in education spending that the state could do without.

In 1950, American public schools employed 2.36 teachers for every non-teacher. Today, the National Center for Education Statistics reveals that of the 104,630 employees at Arizona school districts in 2007-08, only 54,032 of them were teachers. What is more worthy of funding: maintaining an almost 1-to-1 teacher to non-teacher ratio or maintaining services for the mentally ill?

Community colleges are another example. The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) has a current operating budget of more than $683 million; its total budget from all sources is almost $1.5 billion. Yet the district will spend only $276 million on instruction – only 40 percent of its operating budget and only 18.6 percent of its total budget. MCCCD spends more than three times as much on administration and academic support as the state spends on the mentally ill, and the district’s three-year student completion rate is 11 percent. It is not clear what MCCCD is doing with that additional $130 million, but it does not seem to involve graduating students.

Charter schools spend significantly less than district schools and do a better job overall at teaching students. That’s a good deal for taxpayers. Many charter school leaders are understandably nervous about the prospect of additional funding reductions in the event that the proposed tax increase fails. It would have been much more appropriate for the state to reduce district school funding to the same amount that charter schools receive rather than to reduce charter funding too.

When we are cutting services for the mentally ill, suffering high levels of unemployment, and bleeding private-sector jobs, we cannot afford to maintain wasteful education spending as a sacred cow. We should not raise taxes during the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Instead we should figure out how many of those 50,000 non-teachers we can do without.

Matthew Ladner, Ph.D., is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute.