-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 14 November 2002 09:43, Terrell Brown wrote: > From: Michael C. Libby > What we really need, at all levels of government, is some form of line > item > taxation, where your rate is set at x%, but each citizen can earmark > their > contribution for specific areas of government. > > [TB] Really? That would probably be good for public safety advocates. > If, for example, we had a few more beat cops we might not have read in > this mornings paper about a rape at a downtown bus stop at 5:30 last > Friday evening.
Well, I don't think using a recent extreme example is likely to do much other than fan flames and incite hysteria in the public... so I'll ignore this-- except to say: how the heck does this happen in the middle of downtown during rush hour??? it's not a question of where are the Police, but where was anyone with half a clue?! How was it no one was around who could step in and take action? The police simply cannot watch every corner and alley and sidewalk where good citizens might run across the Bad Guys. It's a law of physics or nature or something. Now back to a discussion of taxation... > The Fire Department would probably get lots of money. Maybe. Maybe not. I doubt I would earmark much of my own contribution for them, unless they were constantly under-funded and the city was experiencing a real problem with fires. > What wouldn't get much money? Would we still be cleaning up and then > developing brown spaces? Would we defer infrastructure repair until > the streets and sewers literally fell apart? Would we clean anything? I dunno. I doubt I'd earmark much of my own money for the roads that everyone else uses a lot more than I do, but I'd certainly earmark funding for environmental clean-up (although personally I'd prefer to see the people who MADE the mess forced to clean it up). I'd gladly earmark money for people who might pick up trash-- especially if they were given the ability to ticket litterers. > Would we see paid advertisements for and against various spending > programs along the line of what we see during election campaigns? Probably. We already see plenty of similar stuff. But this is a free speech issue... as long as the money being spent isn't from the budgets of the departments seeking funding what's the problem? Other than that it seems more efficient to just give the money directly to a department you care about rather than spending money on advertising. Talk about silly. > Maybe: This Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood (pan to picture of new > storefront with upper level affordable apartments) has seen millions of > YOUR redevelopment dollars go into .... Don't earmark anymore money > for Northeast send it to Bryn Mahr? OK. You almost have a point. Except that programs like NRP or agencies like MCDA have a city-wide focus and you either contribute to the agency or you don't. And even if you had a geographical earmark you could do, it's likely that people would simply earmark their own geography... so it's not like there suddenly wouldn't be any money in NE. Your counter-example flies in the face of logic. > Then maybe we should just get rid of the City Council and start having > Town Meetings. What is this? The slippery slope? Sorry, but this isn't an argument against line-item taxation, it's simply hyperbole. You seem to be arguing against citizen involvement in government, so I'll just extend that to conclude that you'd support my alternative suggestion: rotational, constitutional monarchy with both the monarch and the legislative body chosen by lottery. I don't know if you paid any attention to the results of the last election, but the City of Minneapolis is not a single person making the same decision all over... it's a fairly diverse place. We have a lot of different opinions... with line-item taxation I'm not sure we'd see things change that much, but I think it'd be a far sight better than getting to vote on referenda to support libraries and schools because all of the regular revenue was handed to developers who haven't (as far as I can tell) actually improved the City much for all that spending. In fact, several of those expensive projects have failed pretty miserably. While obviously this whole notion is a bit underdeveloped, I would envision that the earmark forms would still have some summary information about council-recommended levels and brief mentions of how this worked out last budget cycle in terms of total volume and whether the department came in under/over-budget, etc, and there could still be elected-official oversight to prevent an "over-funded" agency from simply paying everyone six figures or equipping each office with a La-Z-Boy-- basically the money must be used to pursue the mission of that agency in a reasonable way. What's so hard about that? -Michael Libby (Cleveland/North Mpls) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE91aTE4ClW9KMwqnMRAp+AAKC0n5M1+FgP/lH0u1PC3HfvzVCdNQCdFSxz SqerShRpHdFh03q3TPNFSGc= =IrvH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
