Back To The Well Again

by Kerry Thomas

July 11, 2005

As time goes by, more and more I seem to be asking “Haven’t I heard that before?”

Reading through the latest proposals from various special interest groups that promise to help public schools in Wisconsin, the common thread this year seems to be focused on, guess what, raising taxes. They’re still cramming the term “investment” down our throats, and relying on Lenin’s old ideas about collectivism and society’s obligation to itself to somehow guilt us all into believing our human obligation to our fellow citizens is best demonstrated through government forces.

When will the bureaucrats learn that when you spend more money this year than you spent last year, it’s not a cut in spending?

The latest proposal calls for raising Wisconsin’s sales taxes from 5% to 7%. Of course, there’s the promise that our property taxes will then go down, as this increased sales tax revenue will go to fund public schools. It won’t be a tax increase, we’re told, just a shift in the way the taxes are paid. Property tax relief. But it would raise the sales taxes by 40%.

I’m not that old, but I can remember when Tommy Thompson became Wisconsin’s governor in 1987. Wisconsin was facing a fiscal crisis, we were told, and the only way to avert it was by raising the state sales tax, temporarily, from 4% to 5%. As time went on, this temporary tax increase stayed in place, and was even expanded when the counties were also allowed to impose an additional 0.5% sales tax of their own.

State law says the county sales tax may be used "only for the purpose of directly reducing the property tax levy." Isn’t that what the lottery was supposed to do, too?

Yes, you remember the lottery. Remember how it was sold to us, as a means of reducing property taxes, most of which go to fund public schools? Didn’t that work well. How big was your lottery credit on your last property tax bill?

I’m not buying it this time. When you allow government agencies to increase your taxes, they’ll spend every dollar they get our of your pocket. There is no incentive to conserve public money, only to spend it.

Yes, children should be educated, but not indoctrinated. We’re still using a public school system modeled after a 19^th century Prussian military training system. In today’s 21^st century, where we claim to value individuality, does it still make sense to warehouse the community’s kids into cookie-cutter institutions? There’s this thing out there called the Internet, and in an Information Age, it’s a valuable tool for learning.

No matter what your interest, chances are you can find some interesting, and even useful, information about that topic. You can type virtually anything into a search engine, and you’ll get returns. Is it any wonder the concept of home schooling is growing so rapidly?

Here’s a little experiment. Would it be more cost-effective to transport all the community’s kids to a central warehouse during the “school year” or might it be more cost-effective to equip their homes with high-speed two-way communications systems, and use what colleges call distance learning? Kids are people, too, and some people work better at different times of the day. Kids develop their ability to learn at different times of their lives. The cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all approach has seen better days.

With today’s high-speed communications ability, and the development of advanced information technology, our need to gather at a central facility to instruct the masses or to transact commerce has diminished significantly. In an Information Age, if you can think it, someone probably is doing it. Entrepreneurialism is a wonderful thing.

Steve Forbes is right. How long will it take us to unshackle ourselves from the onerous burden of our bureaucratic government and begin to live up to our full potential? In the land of the free, we sure have a lot of people telling us how to live our lives and insisting they know better than us how our money should be spent.

I have an idea. How about if our governments and their minions stick to doing the things their Constitutions allow them to do, and leave the rest to us. Yes, charity begins at home, and Americans are the most generous people in the world. But is it charity if the money is taken from your wallet under threat of force?