Posted by Morbo
Americans are fond of telling pollsters that of course they would support tax increases if the money went for things like schools and libraries.
It’s too bad they don’t mean it.
In 2003, voters in Oregon voted down a temporary income-tax increase of one half percent – it would have cost the average family about $35 per year — to relieve overcrowding in public schools. Classes of 40 students are now common, and some schools have had to shorten the school year.
Perhaps hoping to top that monumentally stupid move, voters in Salinas, Calif., in November rejected two ballot measures that would have increased taxes slightly to fund the city’s cash-starved libraries.
The Washington Post reported on Jan. 2 what happens now: Thirty-three library employees have been laid off, and three buildings are going dark.
Voters in this working-class city might have thought it wouldn’t really happen. But it is. The city — ironically the birthplace of John Steinbeck, one of the country’s greatest novelists — is going to lose its libraries. County libraries will remain open, but that’s cold comfort for many of the city’s residents. The nearest county facility is 20 miles away. Many will not be able to get there.
It didn’t have to be this way.
A modest tax increase — a one-half-cent hike in the sales tax and a new tax on the city’s largest businesses — would have saved the libraries. Oblivious voters either did not care or employed some variant of magical thinking, believing the beleaguered city would find some way to keep the libraries open no matter what.
But with the state in a budget crunch and no bailout from Sacramento expected, it looks like there will be no last-minute miracle to save Salinas’ libraries.
“People just didn’t believe the libraries were going to close,” Lauren Cercone, a member of the Friends of the Salinas Public Library, told The Post. “They thought we were crying wolf.”
For too long, too many Americans have been seduced by the siren song of anti-tax fanatics like Grover Norquist and his brand of caviar conservatives. While attending black-tie events in Washington, D.C., and tooling around town in Lexuses and luxury SUVs, they blithely insist that any government program is tantamount to socialism. What do they care if a library closes? The well-heeled foundations that support them provide big paychecks – enough for multiple trips to Borders.
What’s astounding is that so many low-income people fall for this con, that they willingly shoot themselves in the foot and undercut their children’s future for the sake of half a cent.
It pains Morbo to say this, but I really hope there’s no miracle in Salinas this time. Maybe it’s a good thing that the people there spend some time living in Norquist’s America for a while. They’ll see up close just how lousy that place is, and if we’re lucky they’ll tell the rest of us about it.
Perhaps they will learn, through bitter experience, something progressives have been pointing out for a long time: low taxes equal low services. If you want good stuff, you have to be willing to pay for it.