With the upcoming voter referendum on the jail tax, I have been musing about tax policy.  (Let me disclose up front that I am a candidate for Cincinnati city council.) I have said taxes are too high, but a more complete statement would be that I think taxes are too high for the services we receive.  Further, I think that our government needs to do more, but given their record to date I cannot completely trust them.  The situation is rather like hiring a worker whom you like and who can do certain jobs well, but performs other jobs poorly.  How do you trust that worker to do something they’ve never done before? 

What would I like to see?  I would like to see some kind of universal health care and a better mass transit system.  Right now there is a proposal for a streetcar loop in Cincinnati that would be under 4 miles long and cost almost $100 million.  Even allowing for the cost of the cars, this comes out to about $4,000 per foot. And there is no way that I can justify this, even as a starting system.  Before a comprehensive system could be built at these rates, the city or county would be bankrupt.

The criminal justice system is another example.  Besides the issues that have been covered in The Cincinnati Beacon, the whole system inefficiancy and coldness, with most prisoners just sitting and waiting for their court date, distresses me.  What if the government was responsible for health care and patients started clogging an already huge waiting room?  Would the first response be to build an even larger waiting room?

Of course then there are the huge give-aways, such as the two stadiums, selective tax breaks, subsidies for upscale condos, and even free parking garages for the favored few.  Would a government health care system be likewise separated into the favored and the (far larger) not-so-favored?

I sometimes feel that I am a man without a party.  Forget, for the moment, the Republican and Democratic parties.  Protestations aside, these two parties often seem interchangeable on issues such as the Iraq War, the War on Drugs, corporate welfare, or federal abridgement of civil rights.  The Green and Libertarian Parties are welcome ports in the storms threatening us, and I enjoy working with their members.  The above are my own views on tax policies, and I don’t want to imply that I speak for any party.  But I want better mass transit and universal health care (which I think is the Green position); however, I am pessimistic about any plan our government may put forward (which probably understates the Libertarian position).

My goal, which I admit to be more of a vision, is to improve current government efficiency and services enough so that more people will trust the government to do more.  The Iraq War will cost the country at least $500 Billion.  But taxes for projects that are wasteful or poorly managed make it that much harder to raise taxes for causes that are truly needed.  In the case of the Iraq War, it would have been better to let the taxpayers keep the money. 

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