I was asked to give a five minute presentation on the county tax increase last night and it was REALLY FUN getting all this off my chest. Especially as there were several plants from the education union who were very offended by my daring to take a swat at the sacred cow:
Property tax assessments are going up, and development continues, both of which will produce more income. Do we really need a 20% tax RATE increase (compounded) also? (It was pointed out, though not by me that, together many residents will see a 50% increase in their tax bill by 2016!)
Before considering whether an increase in county taxes would “promote the general welfare,” we need to look at the big picture. If we say, “Oh, the Prince William County tax increases will only lead to a few hundred dollars more in taxes per household – that doesn’t seem too bad,” then we’re missing the forest for the trees. A much better view of the tax burden is provided by the calculation of Tax Freedom day. This year Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 until April 17th (tomorrow, which ironically is also the IRS’s “taxes are due” day), to pay this year’s 29.2% federal, state, and local tax bill. This is four days later than last year due to higher federal income and corporate tax collections. A century ago, our grandparents and great-grandparents paid only 5.9% of their income in taxes, meaning Tax Freedom Day came on January 22. (TaxFoundation.org)
At the federal level things are also a disaster: Jan. 1, 2013, is already being dubbed Taxmaggedon. Seven existing tax policies will end and 18 new taxes from Obamacare will begin, leading to a $494 billion tax increase at the start of next year.” (Heritage Foundation)
The economy is still in trouble, and we’re increasing taxes why? Gas and food prices are up 10% this year, and we’re increasing taxes why? PWC residents are quite often commuters, and many are feeling the pinch of the inflation of gas, food, and other necessary items while their salaries remain flat. To add increasing tax burdens is to add insult to injury.
To understand why taxes keep going up in spite of public disapproval and contrary to common sense, one must look at the incentives of the system. Special interests lobby for programs that benefit themselves, but impose costs on the rest of us. Even if the costs to the public are far larger than benefits, the cost to any one individual is small. The benefits are concentrated among the tiny vocal minorities who benefit from the public’s largesse and have strong incentives to expend time and resources to secure those benefits, while the average citizen who only bears a small cost has little incentive to oppose spending on any particular program. As a result, government expands with no logical stopping point, consuming ever greater resources and providing little in the way of benefits..
The political economist Frederic Basitat, writing in the 1840s, put it well in his essay “What is Seen and Not Seen”:
Have you ever chanced to hear it said "There is no better investment than taxes. Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts on industry..."The advantages which officials advocate are those which are seen. This blinds all eyes.
But the disadvantages which the tax-payers have to get rid of are those which are not seen.
When an official spends an extra hundred sous, it implies that a tax-payer spends a hundred sous less. But the expense of the official is seen, because the act is performed, while that of the tax-payer is not seen, because, alas! he is prevented from performing it.
Let me take one case in point and then be done – since the schools take 62% of our county tax money let’s look at them:
The PW Education Association is placing full-page newspaper ads stating that because apparently we spend less per-pupil than other Northern Virginia school districts, that there is some great wrong to be righted. Let’s look at some statistics.
The PWC schools spend $15,000 per child per year to have students in classrooms of 25 kids or so. However, private schools within this same county charge $5 - $8000 per year and have student/teacher ratios of around 12 to 1. Our family only spends about $500 per year to homeschool our children, and the student/teacher ratio at our house is fabulous. Nationally standardized test score results follow the pattern of class size, not expenditure: homeschoolers score the highest, followed by private school students, with public schools lagging behind. Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
There is always an outcry from the teachers unions if one dares to speak out against this disparity. How dare we talk about taking money away from the children! My question to them is – how do you justify taking money from the nurses and policemen to give more to the educrats? Don’t we work as hard as they do (or harder, and with more risk?) We can't just vote ourselves other people's money. Yes, this program or that field trip sounds nice, but don’t you realize that they all come at the cost of more money taken from the pockets of working parents, who could, if the tax burden were lighter, afford to do more things together as a family? What about all those don’t have children in the government schools – where’s the fairness in them bearing a higher burden? To the PWC Schools and the rest of the government, I say "DO MORE WITH LESS -- the rest of us have to!"
And what I didn’t say (would have loved to, but I was short on time) was this: John Taylor Gatto, former NY State Teacher of the Year, has advocated that, instead of spending all that money on education, it should be invested, and children can grow up learning in freedom all that they want to know from the fabulous and free resources on the internet. Then, when they turn 18, all that money and compounded interest can be handed over so that the young adult can start a small business or sail around the world or follow whatever dream he wishes (obviously including college) to the tune of $400,000 to a million dollars, depending on which state he lives in and how the investments did. I’d like to ask, “Where are my children’s checks for $400,000? They sure could use them right now?”
