You see your taxes go up every year, or month in some instances.
Yet, you see less and less of what those ever increasing tax dollars are doing for you.
Government never stops growing, never stops intruding, no matter how much Danegeld you pay to keep them away.
But now someone in Missouri has thought up a way to punish government for growing in the exact same way they punish you for being successful, and I for one am hoping it becomes law.
A Missouri state Senate panel last week endorsed a plan to tap a new source of revenue to pay for repairs to the state’s crumbling infrastructure: tax the growth in government itself. State Senator John Loudon (R-Chesterfield) came up with the idea to use a state constitutional amendment to force lawmakers to adjust their budget priorities.
“This much-needed investment in fixing and expanding Missouri’s roads and bridges will provide a bounty of economic activity as new businesses are attracted to Missouri, adding thousands of jobs while increasing safety on state highways,” Loudon said in a statement on the amendment’s introduction.
Based on historical averages, the amount of money Missouri treasury collects from citizens grows at a rate of 4.5 percent each year. Loudon’s proposal would siphon off ten percent of the money generated from the year-to-year increase in government revenue. The amount would then be dedicated to the state transportation fund where no more than five percent of the new funding could be diverted to mass transit or other purposes unrelated to the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges.
If ratified, the amendment would direct an estimated $34 million to road maintenance and $2 million to transit in fiscal 2010. By 2012 it would bring $109 million more to roads and $6 million to transit. For this to happen, the General Assembly would have to pass the measure and it would have to be approved by voters in November.
Forcing the government to use the money for actual Constitutional mandates (infrastructure promotes the general welfare for commerce), instead of the cause du jour (aka: Global Warming).
Beautiful.
Hit the above link to find the pdf of the bill.
The concept is fine, but they don’t have the spending habits of the Legislature nailed to the floor just yet, and if road construction is the real goal, they need some way to continue it despite an economic downturn.
The problem all along is the overarching ability of the Legislature, the Executive and just about everyone else in government to raise money by all sorts of different methods, not just taxes.
Here in Oregon, we thought we were limiting government 15 or 20 years ago with the original initiative to do so, but the crooks in Salem figured out a way to grow underneath the cap by expanding the list of “exempted” expenditures.
Then a later initiative capped the ability to expand the list of those which were exempt.
Then the crooks started adding large fees to everything, because fees weren’t mentioned in the initiative, only taxes.
All along, the courts constantly aided the spenders by re-inventing the law to allow new ways for government to collect funds.
The only way to end this game, which ordinary citizens will ALWAYS lose, is to implement the Tobacco Road solution.
Blow it all up and start over again.