Taxpayer Alert…Hold On To Your Billfolds!

This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions.

Well, it is “Smoke and Mirrors” time again. All governments including schools, municipalities, county, and state are busy putting together their annual budgets. This is the time when every department and agency head prepares his/her part of the budget and adds the usual 5%-10% requested “wish list” of increases, then appears before their governing Commissions and appeals for the desired monies. For decades, the governing bodies would then pretend to carefully review each request and then finally award a 3% to 4% increase to the department. They would then herald to the public how they had cut the requested amounts back to only 3% and done their job for the taxpayers. Of course the net impact of compounding 3% increases every year for some 30 to 40 years has gotten us into this mess we are currently facing.

Things began to change for this annual “dog and pony” show last year, as the usual money flow from big brother State and Federal grants began to be reduced due to the economic disasters this nation is facing. Funding availability appears to be lessened this year.

The usual waterfall of funding from higher governments appears to be even less during the coming budget year. Last year some departments managed to get by because they had “pigeon holed’ reserves away in bureaucratic crevices and were able to use these for continuing business as usual. In many instances these reserves are not there any longer.

Now if a business in the private sector faced this dilemma, their immediate course of action would be to reduce staffing through terminations, permanent layoff, temporary layoff, and work schedule reductions. I predict these remedies will not be the action taken by governing authorities in facing the problem this year. Instead, I feel they will attempt to “go back to the well” and dip the pail a little deeper, by raising millage rates and thus dig into the struggling, taxpaying public’s pocketbook. They will adhere to the time honored tradition that bureaucratic jobs are as sacred and protected as sea turtles, and can never be eliminated.

It appears that our property values will be reduced slightly because of pressures created by the obvious market value declines for real estate. However, the taxpayers can expect little or no property tax relief as a result of these re-evaluations, since the governing political bodies will possibly consume those potential savings thru their ability to increase city, school, and county millage rates. Thus, taxpayers had better hold on to their billfolds as tightly as they can…because the long fingers of the bureaucracy are going to be scratching their way into their wallets.

The only good note in all of this sadness is the fact that for many of those elected officials on those Commissions, this is an election year. They may be able to take from us even though we can not afford to pay more….but we can kick the rascals out in November! Remember their actions on funding when you step into that voting booth and you will be “Getting it Right”!



Rudiments: Odds and Ends Worth Mentioning –

● (Always say something nice, My New Years Resolution) Lenox Williams passed away this week. I have known Lenox for many years, since our sons played football at MHS and we worked together in the Boosters Club as proud fathers. He devoted many, many hours to our community, the children of our area, and was always there if a friend needed him. I will miss joking with him.

● Well, they extended the unemployment payments again, paying out past three years of idleness. When do we call it just another welfare entitlement….five years? ten years?

● All of the sidewalks will soon be finished and the construction crews will quit being stimulated, and the census workers will soon be laid off, …..so we can expect unemployment to begin to climb even higher. I personally feel things are worsening as more and more small businesses are failing. Also, the costly foolishness imposed by our uncontrolled EPA is still closing mini-markets across the nation and adding tremendous costs to every new project. Unless something significantly positive helps our economy soon I fear we will soon be eating a second dip of something we do not want.

● At the local level, it appears the County Commission is going to give a 2.5% pay increase to all county employees. This is in addition to adding some $1200 per year in cost to continue to provide fully paid health insurance at new, higher premium levels. This benefit now amounts to about $8000 per year per county employee. Did you get your raise this year????

Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Hatcher Publications.