Venturing into small county politics can be risky business. For example, according to various unofficial reports, the judge sentencing rural Colorado’s Alferd Packer to hang for cannibalism yelled, “Dammit, Packer – there were seven Democrats in this county and you ate five of them!”
As a James Bond film’s bad guy explained how a shark in his swimming pool got indigestion, “He (Packer) ate somebody who disagreed with him.”
(Packer was later paroled and found work as a security guard at a Denver newspaper.)
The students at the University of Colorado voted overwhelmingly to name their cafeteria “The Alferd G. Packer Memorial Grill” – over the furious university president’s objections. Should we fear San Benito High School’s students naming their cafeteria to similarly honor the Donner Party’s cannibalistic culinary pioneers? Because this county was settled in part by survivors of Lake Tahoe’s snowed-in and starving Donner Party.
But the Donner Party’s local descendants have turned out to be model citizens and pillars of our community. And there have been no convincing accusations of cannibalism against them since 1847. So we’ll dare to point out how local folks can relate to the citizens of a small Midwestern Rust Belt town. Its city council chamber’s motto, “In God we trust”, lost a “t”. So for a while during the town’s budget battle, the wall behind the city council-people’s chairs allegedly read, “In God we rust”.
Maybe that’s what inspired Willard Mitt Romney’s recently-hallucinated claim, in Virginia’s capital of the Old Confederacy, that President Obama is secretly plotting to erase “In God we trust” from our coins. No wonder Romney’s Southern gentleman host, 82-year-old televangelist Pat Robertson – who claims that Haiti’s earthquake was God’s righteous vengeance against the hundreds of thousands of black Haitians it killed – abruptly stopped damning “Willie Mitt’s” Mormonism as a non-Christian “cult”.
Speaking of President Obama, his middle class-and-business-tax-cutting, multi-million job-creating American Jobs Act won a majority of votes in the Senate. But Romney’s vice presidential running mate Congressman Paul Ryan’s Senate counterparts killed it with a filibuster, as they’ve done to almost everything Obama has tried to do to help our economy.
Then Mrs. Obama invited the Republican congressional leadership to the White House for dinner and a friendly chat. But the Republicans refused, blaming an unspecified “scheduling conflict”. (What conflicted with dinner at the White House? Republican Congressional Leadership Bowling Night again?!)
So Obama didn’t have the 60 out of 100 senators’ votes to pass the Act. (Obama’s party only had a filibuster-proof 60% for a few months, before the 2010 election.) So this Wednesday, for example, the Senate “voted down” another Obama bill – only 58 yes to 40 no – to pay police and fire departments like Hollister’s to hire military veterans. (A nonpartisan book by experts at the progressive Brookings Institute and the conservative American Enterprise Institute details how partisan Washington grid-lock is worse than it’s ever been. It’s titled, “It’s Worse Than It Looks.”)
Part of the American Jobs Act would have provided cash-strapped local governments like Hollister’s with $35 billion to help keep our cops, firefighters and teachers, despite the drop in tax revenue since the Bush Crash of 2008. That’s why a group in Hollister put a proposed five year, one penny sales tax increase (Measure E) on November’s ballot.
Probably 50 to 60% of the estimated $3.2 million a year raised would be spent to keep Hollister’s current police and firefighters. But one respected county supervisor who fought to pass E’s predecessor, Measure T, opposes measure E because he says T’s millions were “squandered”.
Because of the Washington-style partisan grid-lock in Sacramento – even stopgap tax increases require a 2/3 vote of both the Senate and the Assembly, which Governor Jerry Brown’s Democrats can’t muster – most of the money from State of California Propositions 30 or 38 would go to our kids’ suffering schools. (Does any investment pay off better than education? Especially in today’s highly-competitive worldwide economy, it helps everybody to have better-educated workers and citizens.)
Governor Brown’s Prop 30 is more moderate and shorter-term than the more expensive 38. Prop 30 is designed to help get the state’s schools through the tail end of Bush’s Not So Great Depression’s roller-coaster recovery, until state and local tax revenues climb back to normal again. Prop 30 puts less of a burden on taxpayers earning less than $250,000 a year than Prop 38 would. If both propositions get a majority of the votes, only the one with more votes will become law.
Of course, the City of Hollister and the State of California can’t just print greenbacks -or the coins that Romney claims won’t say “In God we trust” anymore if we reelect President Obama. Article I of the U.S. Constitution says that only the federal government has the power to print money.
The individual colonies printed money before and during the Revolutionary War to, for example, field the “state” militias that did a lot of the fighting. But the colonies and their Continental Congress – and skilled British government counterfeiters – printed so much paper money not backed by gold or silver that by the time General Washington and our French allies cornered the British at Yorktown, the money was “not worth a continental”.
The constitutional provision only allowing the feds to print countless stacks of money was a victory for President Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. (Hamilton’s face is on our $10 bills.) But Al died in a pistol-duel with President Thomas Jefferson’s vice president. (And you thought politics THESE days is a rough business. But anything beats being cannibalized up at Tahoe by your own kids.)
In the 1970’s, federal “revenue-sharing” was introduced as a bipartisan effort to help fund states and local governments that don’t have access to the trillions raised by the federal income tax and the U.S. Treasury’s overtime-working printing presses. In a similar way, Obama’s American Jobs Act would have helped avoid the need for Hollister’s Measure E and California’s Propositions 30 or 38, by supplementing our local budgets and increasing local tax revenues. (By saving public-service jobs and by the economic “multiplier effect” from people with jobs spending money and creating other jobs.)
Ironically, some local governments have resorted to funding their police and sheriffs’ departments with tax revenue from medical marijuana. San Jose’s recent ballot battles to control the cost of its police and firefighters’ salaries and pensions have that city leaning on its medical marijuana clinics to cough up more sales tax millions. And for a while, Mendocino County spent permit fees paid by its world-famous medical marijuana farmers to fund seven sheriff’s deputies.
In 2010, 48% of San Benito County voters did vote for Prop 19. 19 would have legalized pot and treated it like booze and tobacco (which, unlike pot, kill half a million Americans a year) – that is, by strictly regulating it (with penalties of up to seven years in the state prison for violations) and heavily taxing it. But given all the money our local elected officials have already understandably spent to chase our county’s nauseous cancer chemotherapy patients’ one medical pot clinic even out of its current discreet rural location, the idea of funding Hollister’s emergency personnel with medical pot sales taxes if Measure E fails would probably go over with those local elected officials like a “lead balloon”. Or worse: like a “Led Zepellin”.
So, in the meantime, “In God we rust.”
