liz_marcs | Do Not Bug the Voter Who Needs to Get Home and Throw Up

Current Mood: sick

Do Not Bug the Voter Who Needs to Get Home and Throw Up

I think I remember why I haven't eaten at a fast-food place in more than two years (or is it verging on 3?), and why I haven't eaten at a McDonald's in something like 4 years.

Their food makes me yak. I don't mean figuratively. I mean literally. I barely made it home for a horrible technicolor yawn.

I think I saw what I ate for breakfast yesterday.

*blerg*

I somehow managed to keep it together during grocery shopping. Because I felt like crap-o-la, I decided to hit up my local Hannaford's instead of going to the farm stand. Big mistake. My grocery bill made my eyes pop out of my head and may have contributed to the feeling of nausea.

Sadly, you can see the effects that the increased food prices are having. The 25-pound bags of rice have doubled in price in the last month, for example. Then there's the mysterious case of the shrinking food...i.e., bagels are the same price, but instead of getting 6 you get 4.

I don't even want to talk about the price of meat. It'll make me cry. Or throw up. Actually, given the way my stomach feels right now, I suspect option two is more likely.

Something strangely interesting to note, however: at least half the people shopping today brought their own re-usable shopping bags (including yours truly). I don't think I've seen a ratio that high in, oh, ever. What makes it doubly weird is that almost all of these reusable bags were from Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck), Trader Joe's (aka Half Your Paycheck, But For Brands You've Never Heard Of), and Costco (aka Enough Canned Goods To Last You One Year). My bagger was quite taken with my hot/cold bag from Sam's Club (a gift from the parents), because of it's size and handle locking mechanism. Seriously, it looked like we were all advertising that people should grocery shop somewhere else while paying for our Hannaford groceries.

Anyway, as I'm walking out of the store (complete with the feeling that I needed to yak getting ever-stronger), I was waylaid by two teens who wanted me to sign a petition to get their dad on the ballot for city government.

Let me admit here and now that I acted like a classic bitch. However, I tend to get that way when you hand me platitudes, no answers, and a brainless drumbeat of cutting taxes with no plan.

Dramatis Personnae:

Bitchy Moi (BM)

Campaigning Teen (CT)

Campaigning Teen (CT): Excuse me, miss? Would you be willing to sign this petition?

Bitchy Moi (BM): [suspecting that she's going to yak on this kid's shoes any second now] What's it for?

CT: To get my Dad on the ballot for City Council.

BM: [groans, but feels she should do her voter-ly duty] What does he stand for?

CT: He's anti-war and anti-taxes.

BM: [brain snaps] Anti-war. What does that have to do with running for City Council?

CT: [deer in headlights look]

BM: [feels bad] Look, anti-war I can get on board with.

CT: [relieved as he shoves petition under my nose] So you'll sign the petition?

BM: Only if you tell me what you mean by "anti-taxes," because that tells me absolutely nothing.

CT: It's about good economy.

BM: [waits for CT to elaborate, when there's nothing more forthcoming, considers throwing up on CT's shoes to make a point] That tells me exactly nothing. What do you mean by "anti-taxes?"

CT: [uncertainly] Cutting taxes?

BM: [waits for CT to elaborate, when there's nothing more forthcoming, begins to think throwing up on CT's shoes is looking better and better] Fine. Cutting taxes. How are you going to make up the shortfall? I ask, because just about every city in the state is on the verge of bankruptcy, so I'm thinking cutting taxes is a bit too pat of an answer.

CT: [looks relieved] By cutting city spending!

BM: [brain snaps in frustration] From where?

CT: [surprised] What?

BM: Where is your dad going to cut city spending? Because telling me that you're going to cut taxes and make up for it by cutting spending doesn't tell me a thing. Where's he going to cut spending?

CT: [blinking] Ummmm, he's going to cut taxes!

BM: [begins to think throwing up on CT's shoes is looking like an idea whose time has come] That's. Not. An. Answer. Surely your father has at least looked at the city budget, right? Surely he's got a list of things that he thinks could be done more economically.

CT: [mumbling] I dunno.

BM: [thinks that instead of throwing up on CT's shoes, she should just hit him with a 2X4 cluebat] I've got a better idea. Don't cut taxes. Do cut whatever fat you can find in the municipal budget, and here I'm thinking that we should start by cutting the pay for City Councilors. Then, take that money, and invest it in asphalt so the city can keep up with road maintenance. Then, invest whatever is left over into road salt so we can stockpile for the winter.

CT: [starts looking for an escape route] That's not what my dad is running on.

BM: Then he doesn't want my signature. [Pat's CT on the arm, and then makes a mad dash for the car because I can feel lunch is about to re-appear in a nasty way]

Aside from the desperate need to get home so I could toss my cookies in private, a lot of my frustration with these local "small government, no taxes, no spending" nitwits is because they're starting from a bevy of false assumptions and they always end up backtracking from their "small government, no taxes, no spending" promises.

And why is this?

The answer is simple: Not one of these people have actually sat down and glanced at a municipal budget, let alone read it from cover to cover, before they decide to run for public office.

That's right. Not. One. In 10 years of being a reporter, and *mumble mumble* years of being a regular ol' joanne who pays attention even when it's not election season, anytime someone runs for municipal office and their platform consists of "small government, no taxes, no spending," I can almost guarantee they've never seen a municipal budget in their lives. (Please note: There are always exceptions to this rule, but I can count the exceptions on one hand and have fingers left over. You can always tell the exceptions because they tend to have an actual plan as opposed to an empty-headed promise).

Look, a municipal budget isn't that big. We're not talking the federal budget here with its gazillion pages and arcane rules that allow for earmarks and additional spending after the budget has theoretically been approved. I'm not saying a municipal budget is small, but you can certainly read it in a couple of days.

So I would think that if you're running for city government on a platform of "small government, no taxes, no spending," you'd actually, I dunno, get a copy of the city budget and read it over so when a bitch like me comes along you'll be able to answer my questions. It's not like this is hard to get. City budgets are public records. By law, city hall has to give it to you if you ask for it.

Hell, when I was a reporter, I had to read municipal budgets all the time. I kept a copy of the damn thing (and sometimes there was more than one "damn thing") on my desk. So I don't think I'm asking for too much here.

So before you fall for the "smaller government, no taxes, no spending" promises of your average poltical nitwit running for local office, please keep the following facts about municipal budgets in the U.S. in mind:

40%–50% of a municipal budget is tied up in salaries and benefits for employees. While we've all heard about the department head making $250,000, most city employees get paid a hell of a lot less. Most of them get paid market rates or lower (sometimes a lot lower). If you cut personnel, guess who tends to get cut? Not the department head making $250,000. I guarantee it.
20%–30% of the budget is money that the city is required to spend due to federal and state mandates. Some of these mandates (i.e., roads, some school funding requirements, etc.) are funded, but many are not (i.e., clean water requirements, landfill requirements). In short, the city doesn't have a choice. By law, they're required to spend this money and they can't spend it on anything else.
Whatever percentage of your budget is left over is called "discretionary spending." Now, keep in mind that more than half of your budget is completely out of your control. The slice of the pie that you, as a city, actually controls ranges from 40% to 20%. And the discretionary spending? Not so discretionary. Unless you think a fire department is a waste of money. Or maybe you can do away with a 24-hour police department (Don't laugh, I know of some smaller towns that don't have a 24-hour police department). If you're in the northern part of th U.S., I'm sure you'll be more than happy to do away with plowing or salt for the roads in the winter. What about health department inspections of restaurants? I'm sure you could do away with filling in the potholes on the city streets, too. And, oh, hey! We don't really need to replace those 20-year-old biology books at the high school with something a little bit newer, do we?

Look, I'm not saying that there's no fat in a municipal budget, because I'm sure there is (looking at you "business expenses" for city councilors). I'm just saying that anyone running for municipal public office should, I dunno, actually know how a city budget works. I'd think that'd be the minimum requirement, but that's just me.

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*Cheers*

I've worked in local government finance. I know just how difficult budgeting is, because there's never enough money to cover all the legal requirements and all the things the current administration pledged it would do if it got elected, let alone all the things that really, really should be done because they'd make the area so much better. And it's so much harder in a low-taxes administration, because they really don't understand how much things cost (or that "back-office staff" aren't just dead wood, but provide essential support for "front-line services").

It drives me up the wall when I hear people bitching about paying taxes, because I can bet you they'll bitch twice as much when the pothole in their road doesn't get fixed, or their granny is stuck in hospital because there are no beds in the nursing homes, or they have to start paying for the bus that gets their kids to the school ten miles away that they chose because it has a better reputation than the one down the road...

It's so nice to see someone who Gets It!

Those girls probably went home to their dad and complained about how mean you were.

Exactly. The main reason people don't like paying taxes is when they can't see the benefits. Sometimes it's true, but often it's a misperception fed by cheap campaign rhetoric. It's easy to despise taxes since most people don't notice how they effect the everyday, and when they do, it's negative.

For example, Chicago has had near constant road construction for at least a decade. No sooner is one finished than another begins. Which means maintenence, something good, seems like a negative.

This is partially natural - the city's size might take an impossible amount of simultaneous projects to get ahead of the repair cycle. But the city is also behind due to weak methods and materials driven by crony politics and basic poor thinking.

For example, different groups with different schedules do different steps, resulting in unfinished work sitting for months. At best, this pisses of residents, at worst, weather and time undermines the repair process. The city also overuses temporary pothole fills, which are ulitmately not a fix because they let the damage continue.

No one wants to pay more when things like that goes, but not paying means more corners getting cut and more tax fatigue and so on. Demonizing taxes doesn't halt this cycle, it speeds it up.

Gotta mock the sheer stupid, but at the same time the fact that this sort of attitude is so incredibly prevalent makes a strong case for the idea of Participatory Budgeting of the sort they've practiced in Porto Alegre in Brazil and perhaps a few other places. Get people, right down to neighbourhood level, looking at what they actually want from their city, forming priorities, voting on things. So if what people really, really want is lower city taxes then they're going to have to collectively come up with the plan themselves, rather than voting for the clueless "small government" candidate and waiting to be disappointed. Or maybe when people sit down and look at things they'll realise they actually want something else.

Still, however stupid your city politics may be, right now you can happily sit and mock the Londoners, who've just elected as Mayor a racist Tory buffoon who has described black people as "picaninnies" with "water melon smiles", and the Romans, who'se newly elected Mayor is saluted as "Duce" by his supporters.

I always ask the 'no tax' people if they like their trash pickup and having a flush toilet. Do they like having police and firemen on call? How about clean, well-lit streets, and no weeds in the ditches and mosquito control? How about that truck that comes and cleans the yard waste up, then leaves a nice mountain of mulch for their gardens in the recycle area? How about the library? The recreational center, the swimming pool? The schools?

They usually holler 'uncle' by about then.

Hee. This reminds me of a conversation I had in the Philadelphia airport with a guy who proudly told me that he doesn't pay taxes because he doesn't believe in government. I asked him how he'd gotten to the airport, and he looked at me like I was an idiot. "I drove." "Well, then, you just used my roads without paying for them. I'd appreciate it if you didn't use them again."

Short conversation. :-)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHA!!! I would have LOVED to see his face!

I'd like to know how he gets away with "not paying any taxes." Last time I checked, sales taxes weren't optional. In Utah, 42 cents of the $3.45 we're paying at the pump goes to the government. You can't just wave your hand and make them disappear. He drove? Did he register his car? That's a tax.

And if he's not paying any income tax, I believe the IRS would like a word--just ask Wesley Snipes.

That made my day.

Some of that stuff truly depends on where you live, though. In my small corner of the US, you'd be looked at like there was a second head growing out of your armpit if you asked when the municipal government was going to clean your "yard waste" or leave you any mulch in a recycle area, or where the recreational center or municipal swimming pool was. Then again, our tax dollars were used to purchase an old, nonworking military helicopter (I think it was a Huey) for a memorial for local citizens who've died in military service over the last century or so, so I guess everybody's got their priorities, just not the same ones.

Where I live, there are tons of trees. Leafy ones. And pine trees. If the city did not provide curb-side yard waste pickup, there would be a riot, and Trash Mountain would be twice as tall. I just wonder where they're going to put the neighborhood mulch pile this year- the usual place still hasn't dried out from the floods.

I'm sorry you're sick. Being sick myself at the moment, I totally empathize.

People who complain about paying municipal taxes should be forced to plow their own roads, fix their own potholes, fight their own fires and haul their own shit to the sewage treatment plant. Oh, and pay to have it treated.

IIRC when Reagan was elected in California on a 'cut taxes' platform the next day several hundred police, fire and ambulance crews were laid off because there would be no money to pay them.

In fairness, just because the teen who accosted you didn't have any answers doesn't mean the prospective candidate didn't. It's a serious long shot, but hey, it could happen. Maybe. Well, never mind. :)

Never approach someone who looks like they're about to toss their cookies if you want a civil answer. CT brought it on himself.

The truly lousy thing about cutting or raising taxes is that the elected official's staffor 'business expenses' are never on the chopping block, it's the aforementioned fire department or police force which will be shortfalled to get people to pony up.

I hope you feel better soon.

I just wonder why people keep falling for 'pie in the sky' solutions that don't solve anything. (as to city budgets, I've read ours for years. Not that hard to understand if you can balance a check book.)

Sounds like he gave his kids a few buzz words and nothing else. But given the morons in government lately, he may have told them all he knows.

I'd've asked if I was supposed to call Mr City Councilman if I heard someone trying to break in, or if I saw someone's house on fire.

We're in Canada now, and yeah, taxes are high. But if I get sick I can go to a doctor without worrying about bankruptcy. And recycling is SOP -- the regional waste management group hands out compost bins to any household that asks for one. Do I mind paying taxes for that? Do I look stupid?

Personally I sign every petition that gets put in front of me to have somebody put in the ballot, because if they want to do the job then they should have the opportunity to do it.

I once signed the nomination for a Libertarian candidate, not because I agreed with him, but because I thought he deserved the chance to lose the election fair and square. I told him that. He thanked me. We remained on good terms.

What is it about MacDonald's? I used to quite like to eat there once in a while, but every time I've eaten anything there in the past fifteen years--even just a few french fries--I've gotten horrible indigestion. Do they get a twenty-year deal on some special brand of stomach-upsetting fry oil?

Good for you for taking CT and her dad seriously enough to ask some sensible questions. I hope that at some point, when she recovers from the trauma of being asked to think for herself, she actually does think about them.

Oh the "cut taxes" people get me SO MAD I could chew nails. One of our best selectmen was voted out last election, because he supported the override (which was also voted down). And the man who was put in his place? Was one of the cut-the-budget yahoos. I wonder how long it will be before he changes his tune?

Probably about as long as it takes him to absorb the FACTS about the town's financial circumstances.

*grr*

*goes off to find some nails*

Oh yes, the 'we pay too much taxes' crowd. According to them there's far too much waste, but when you ask for specifics, all you hear are crickets.

Like you said, I'm sure there's some fat that can be trimmed, but it's nowhere near what people think it is. In the end, the folks that vote these turkeys into office end up getting hurt by it, and when things go to pot, they start looking around for someone to blame, instead of in the mirror.

Sorry, just a little bitter.

I'm just saying that anyone running for municipal public office should, I dunno, actually know how a city budget works. I'd think that'd be the minimum requirement, but that's just me.

Nope, it isn't just you.

In California, the schools run completely seperately from government until you get up to the state level, so that "cutting biology textbooks" or whatever wouldn't be the city council's business. (Doesn't stop the budget cuts though; just that it's through the state Department of Education and the state budget. Which has been enacted late two of the last four years.)

As far as law enforcement, our county (I don't know what others do) has a program where the city can contract with the county to cover it with the sheriff's dept. instead, and they provide a building for a sheriff's station. I don't know how cost effective it is, but it takes all those things like salaies and hiring and such out of the city's hands and replaces all the costs with a predetermined flat rate, so at least it's consistent. We have at least 4 suburban cities (generally those with newer city governments, and which border on unincorporated areas of the county anyway) which have chosen to do this.

In my area you don't have to get signatures to get on the city or county ballots, you just register and pay a small fee. Usually we have 12-15 people for like 3 or 4 city council seats. The only petitions I've ever seen were for state or county ballot initiatives, and when we had the "recall the governor" thing and the resulting special election. Usually I sign for everything, figuring that if someone's gone to the trouble of putting out a ptition, it deserves to be on the ballot. The only exception I've made was with the marriage amendment to the state constitution (I think gay marriage is harmless and banning it is discriminatory, so I refused to sign that one).

Yeah, the town I was reared in didn't have a courthouse, a jail, or a police force. We had one cop on the town payroll at one time, but they cut his job when the budget got too tight. Then we had to depend on the Sheriff's Dept. But then again my town had one traffic light, and one bar, LOL. It wasn't exactly the crime capital of the USA.

McDonalds is particularly heinous. *sympathizes*

Around here, everyone uses the Weis shopping bags because they're only 99 cents - or 1.99 for the thermal bags.

Kudos on quizzing the kids. You probably gave them something to think about.

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