Spending Cuts Begin At Home

Tweet

Like most other counties throughout the state of Wisconsin, Rock Counties 2007 budget includes a 9.7 percent increase over last year. The county needs to figure out how to raise about $15 million dollars without cutting services or jobs. Part of the increase is due to inflationary pressures while $11 million is earmarked to pay for the UW-Rock County expansion.
The county has suggested a half-a-cent sales tax increase for the past three years instead of piling on property tax increases. At least one county supervisor, Adam Peer along with unofficial members of the board, the editorial staff of the Janesville Gazette are against the sales tax increase.

JG editorial excerpt:
Rather than relieving property taxes, a sales tax just gives government more money to spend. It discourages commerce, especially in communities along the southern border, where Illinois residents often travel to avoid their states heftier sales tax on big ticket items. A sales tax is also regressive. Elderly people on fixed incomes and those working near the minimum wage are hit the hardest.

Assuming the tax is on all purchases, I don’t know how many elderly individuals would spend $10,000 in a year on consumer goods and food and not afford to pay the extra $50 in taxes. And as far as the neighbor to the south is concerned, our UW-Rock grads who flock there to live for the higher paying jobs don’t seem to mind the higher regressive sales tax. The argument about traveling 30 miles or so to Rock County in order to save a couple dollars in taxes for the sake of personal prosperity no longer applies and is dead on arrival.

I am against higher local taxes of all kind, but also realize there is a balance that must be struck in the name of social and economic progress. Unfortunately, sales tax on individual purchases ignores the consumers income and economic class, but a half-cent is relatively small compared to the $100 to $500 hits a property taxpayer absorbs annually for local expenditures.

Today, thanks largely to the White House economic policy, we live in a wildly unpredictable and inflationary economy that is held together with a patchwork of discretionary taxcuts, manipulated interest rates and poor paying middle-class jobs. Things have gotten so bad that we should now consider no tax increases as a tax cut.

Without this sales tax, I don’t know how the county will raise the revenue needed without raising property taxes again. If Adam Peer and friends think they can reduce spending by $15 million for 2007, I suggest they announce what jobs and services they will cut as soon as possible, before the elections. If they fail to do so, property tax payers will be stuck with another regressive tax increase and may have to make some tough spending cuts of their own to meet their obligations, starting with $200-a-year subscriptions.