Local Taxes Not to Blame

To the Editor:

Will Martin’s letter last week made some good points. Ever rising property taxes are damaging and unfair for people and families in varying economic circumstances. Growing inflationary pressure on local property values leaves county officials with a justifiable reason to raise taxes. But it also leaves them with cover for the measure of their increases, an act for which they do have a great deal of control. Tightening budgets and lowering taxes is never easy -- and rare without some level of taxpayer pressure on elected representatives.

Rocketing property taxes are also possible only if property owners can afford to pay them.. If inflation and continuing bad national management collapse the economy, it will leave all of us suffering a replaying of the 1930’s Great Depression -- with local government unable to collect ever more taxes from cash strapped local citizenry, Here the letter does miss the real villain propelling the unfairness of property taxes: the mismanaged federal government and confiscatory inflation. But it wouldn’t hurt locally to put all county, school district and city budgets and actual financials on line down to line-item payments. How can we expect tax money to be respected if voters never see how their money is actually spent. Few of the folks in charge of spending would favor that and would give a long list of arguments why it wouldn’t work. But it’s time for tax paying voters to demand accountability and full transparency from the people spending their money.

So many of our problems, local and national, could do with a lot more open forthright discussion and less blame gaming. Ought we all, red blue or flushed with indifference, step back from the circular firing squad and start aiming at the proper target -- the near collapse of the American culture of self-reliance, honesty and modesty. We have a choice. We can be dumb, passive and poor the way things are going. Or we can stop being dumb, start asking honest questions and building back the character that made this a great, pragmatic, all things possible country.