Commentary: Priorities, not parcel tax

Cheers to County Supervisor Dene Bustichi in his commentary last week about school funding. But why a parcel tax? It’s time to turn off the tax spigot and force government at all levels to live within its means — that is to say, within our means. Is it really unreasonable to have to choose between attracting and keeping good teachers and funding new facilities? Families and small businesses make choices like that every day.
Dr. Susan Silver’s view, that the quality of education is proportionate to funding, has been disproved by decades of rising per-capita education costs and declining literary and math skills in our public school graduates. Superintendent Silver’s model of taxpayer generosity, Santa Clara County, is not a model worth emulating.
Rather than scold the taxpayers, perhaps she should direct her ire at the state’s Senate, Assembly and governor for failing to focus their spending on the priorities of government, or for letting the size of the state budget race ahead of the citizens’ ability to pay for it these past eight years.
It’s time for taxpayers to stop funding governments that have shown time and again that they cannot manage the money they have, cannot even put priorities (police, fire, roads, schools, parks) ahead of wish-list items like Assemblyman Bill Monning’s new $10 million Ocean Protection Council (Assembly Bill 1217) or, even worse, the single-payer health program proposed for California by Senate Bill 810, which Monning also supports.
This last item deserves our special focus and attention. Even as voters slapped down legislation to put government in charge of the health care sector at the federal level, California lawmakers are attempting to resurrect it here. I ask simply: Are they nuts?
On top of a 20 percent year-over-year structural shortfall in the state budget, they want to add another multi-hundred-million dollar entitlement? They expect us to believe that a government that cannot manage its basic services, that squanders a boom-time windfall and in bad times doesn’t have the discipline to cut budgets, is somehow going to manage a huge health care bureaucracy and deliver quality health care to us?
Every such decision by government to spend on something new means that it has less to spend on existing programs, including education.
I lived in New York City when Rudy Giuliani took over a 30 percent structural deficit from his predecessor. He immediately cut a number of city taxes, eliminated or pared nonessential city agencies (e.g., the NYC Human Rights Board, Office of the Public Advocate), re-negotiated union contracts and consolidated six different police departments into the New York Police Department. He focused city spending on the priorities: Police, fire, schools, sanitation, roads and bridges. He challenged city managers to get more out of their current staffs and budgets. Liberals screamed bloody murder, the city was solvent within two years, tax revenues went up, and quality of life visibly improved.
Giuliani was far from a perfect mayor, but his approach to managing the city’s operations was based on the commonsense notion that letting people keep more of what they earn and reducing operating expenses on business would lead to increased economic activity and wealth. It’s an approach that continues to deliver in states like Texas today.
It can be done here in California, too, at the local and state level — but only if taxpayers demand it and stop tolerating public officials whose solution to every problem is to take more of our money and leave us with less take-home pay to care for our families and homes.
• David deMilo owns a home in Scotts Valley, where he has lived for two years.