One thing that truly gets my goat is the debate over taxes. For too long our leaders have engaged in a simplistic, name-calling exchange in which supporters of lower taxes get labeled as mean-spirited robber barons looking out for the rich and those in favor of higher taxes on more government services get labeled as the expletive du jour, socialists. It's overly simplistic and it doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is that we will always have to pay some taxes because we will always need the government to provide some services. The rub is that we need to agree on which services the government provides and then somehow create a tax structure that will fund those services.
Unfortunately our leaders have been totally negligent in, well, leading us in the essential debate on the role of government. It's easy to blame one side or the other, but in the end it's a two way street and all of our leaders are responsible, as are we for not calling "BS" on them a long time ago.
I bring this up today because of a couple of news items that Ed Cone pointed to. One is about Greensboro's budget gap, and the other is about the drastic service cuts that "tax averse" Colorado Springs is having to make. From the second article:
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled. The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter. Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that. Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero. City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need. I don't know what the leaders of Colorado Springs have been saying about taxes and city spending over the last couple of years, but if that city is like the vast majority of the country the issue was framed as a choice between paying higher taxes so that "welfare mothers" could soak the system and lower taxes that would spur a dynamic business environment. I'm simplifying, but hopefully I'm also making a point. For too long our leaders have failed to do the hard work of explaining the relationship between taxes and services. I'm sure that if you asked the citizenry you could pretty quickly come up with a list of "must have" services like fire departments, police departments and public works departments. The harder part is getting citizens to agree on what's more important; health clinics for the poor or one more park; a new library or a homeless shelter; adding more lanes to the roads or starting a light rail system. That's where leadership comes in. Explain to us the consequences of choosing the library over of the homeless shelter, or if we choose both explain to us how that will affect our taxes. We won't all agree on the priorities, but if we're engaged in a serious discussion and treated like the adults that we are, then maybe, just maybe, we'll re-elect you even when you make the unpopular but necessary decision to raise our taxes and give us a community to safely and happily live in.
