Tax savvy? Frugal? Full of it?

Back when I was an engineer, one of the projects I worked on was a tertiary treatment facility for the city of Stockton in California. In case you don’t know, a tertiary treatment facility is an advanced sewage treatment plant. The water coming out of the plant was so clean; it was purer than the water in most city drinking water systems. Logically, it should have been piped directly into the drinking water system of the city of Stockton. It was logical and made a lot of sense to me, but the general public refused to even consider drinking the output of a sewage plant. Instead, we dumped the clean water into the dirty Stockton River, and then several yards upstream was the intake pipe for the city water treatment plant where they purified the river water to make it suitable to drink. To me, it was a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money.

Most people I have met do not like paying taxes, but almost all enjoy the benefits of our civilization and realize that we have to pay for them. Those who do not mind paying taxes acknowledge that they enjoy clean water out of the faucet, paved roads, and yes, public education.

Surveys show there is about a third of the population who will always vote against any tax, regardless how much they personally benefit from the services the tax pays for. It is the same logic that played out in Stockton. It is not logic at all, just the same strained reasoning that complains about the waste in government while continuing to reelect the same “wastrels,” and refusing to actually get involved to find out what is really happening and who, if anyone, is wasting what.

We just had a special session of the legislature, called in response to the purveyors of the delusion that we are overtaxed in Washington state. So we spent extra money to appease the fear mongers who insist we are spending too much money.

Hopefully, we will soon get to the point where we will elect reasonable people who we trust to do the best they can. Then we need to decide what kind of state we want to live in, and provide the revenue, yes, called taxes, to do a quality job.

I have been a resident of Washington for 30 years. I have also lived in two other countries and several states where the taxes were higher, the state government less responsive, and the quality of life lower. Recently, I have observed the emergence of prophets of fear, who make their living preying on peoples’ concerns about being taken advantage of and spreading misinformation and rumor to support their business of personal greed. These professional cynics don’t care if they destroy the communities’ quality of life, because they are personally getting richer. If you believe the merchants of fear, who want to destroy our state by starving our government of revenue and if you think there is a lot of waste here, I will be happy to forward you this e-mail I received about $48 million sitting in an unclaimed bank account in South Africa. All you have to do is …