Premeditated, cold-blooded, deficit spending is bad government.
When it enacted Section 99268 of our Public Utilities Code, our
Legislature authorized the transit agencies to collect only 15
percent of their operating costs from riders. Thus, they
intentionally engineered budget deficits of 85 percent of their
operating costs, which the taxpayers must subsidize.
Dear Editor:
Premeditated, cold-blooded, deficit spending is bad government. When it enacted Section 99268 of our Public Utilities Code, our Legislature authorized the transit agencies to collect only 15 percent of their operating costs from riders. Thus, they intentionally engineered budget deficits of 85 percent of their operating costs, which the taxpayers must subsidize.
When you add capital and fixed costs, taxpayers are paying about 99 percent of the costs of public-sector transit. This may be great for public-sector union employees of VTA and other transit agencies, but it is adding to unbearable burdens for taxpayers. Shifting the transport costs of these intentional deficits onto motorists through such devices as vehicle license fees, gas taxes, etc. is a self-defeating philosophy our Legislator should reverse. Instead of deterring self-sufficient motorists, our leaders should admit their failed experiment in socialist transit and privatize public-sector transit.
We must get government out of the transportation business. Increased deficit spending by adopting Prop 56 on the March ballot will be throwing gas on the fire. Unless we want to follow the course the Soviet planners charted for the U.S.S.R., we must reject socialist transportation – by bus, rail, Lite Rail, Caltrain, Bullet Train, etc. – that fuels the governments’ budget fiascoes.
Until government stops wasting tax money to move empty buses and trains, taxpayers should not be expected to bear larger tax burdens to pay for politicians’ pet pork-barrel projects. Taxing motorists out of their cars will produce a socialist state like the ones in Europe from which people fled to America. For example, the county’s annual $1 million subsidy to County Transit costs taxpayers about $9 million because the county gets back only 11 cents per dollar from Sacramento. Yet our taxpayers are asked to pay higher taxes with Prop 56 while the buses travel with mostly empty seats almost all the time. What a travesty.
The pork-barrel politicians in the Politico-Transit alliance are making the robber barons seem like altar boys. Until the Legislator gives us sound, sustainable transport policies, voters should reject their demands for higher taxes like Prop 56. It is high time to end this ruinous policy of intentionally bad government. Caveat Viator!
Joe Thompson,
Tres Pinos
