Main Street

Turn Out the Lights

This is what it looks like when you have no tax base:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

But don’t worry – people won’t be needing to mow those green spaces for long, because there’s no budget to water or fertilize them and they should be brown and dead within a few months!

With people unable to afford to spend much, the city’s sales tax collections went way down. Voters refused a property tax increase—and of course, property tax can be a horribly regressive form of taxation, since for instance someone might still be living in a house they could afford back when they had a job, but be on the brink of losing that as well.

So what you get is a graphic illustration of how you don’t climb out of a deficit without improving the jobs situation. Success breeds success. Doubling down on what’s not working now just leaves you on dark streets with no trash cans or safety officers.

For some people, that feels personal. There are the people who might lose the community center that’s taken care of their kids for reasonable rates. The business owners dependent on tourism—and how many tourists are going to go somewhere else when they hear about these cuts? And as for safety:

Hansen, the criminal-justice student, grows especially exasperated when recalling a scary incident a few years ago as she waited for a bus. She said a carload of drunken men approached her until the police helicopter that had been trailing them turned a spotlight on the men and chased them off. Now the helicopter is gone, and the streetlight she was waiting under is threatened as well.

Naturally, some business leaders think the answer is to just cut salaries for city employees. One resort executive thinks his business is a great example—after all, he only spends $24,000 per employee!

As Amanda Marcotte writes, this guy isn’t proposing a real answer to the problem. He’s part of the problem:

By paying his employees so little they can barely afford food and rent, he’s basically choking off a revenue stream into the city, because they aren’t paying that much taxes.  If his people could afford to do things like buy property, they’d pay property tax that the city could use to pay its lighting bill.  But here’s Bartolini, who is a huge part of the problem, complaining because some people out there aren’t starving to death, and starving the government while they’re at it.  Why is he complaining?  Presumably, a government that’s falling apart is what he wants.  Except that people like him are extremely narrow-minded and selfish, and I’ll bet you a lot of money he’s pissed, because infrastructure falling apart means that he’s losing tourist dollars to cities that aren’t teetering on the brink, or at least where the grass is green. But he can’t think about the money coming in, because he’s so intently focused on maximizing human suffering in the hated working classes.  He’s only interested in looking at ways to impoverish workers.

Now, maybe the resort executive doesn’t actually think his intention is to maximize human suffering. But the point is, he doesn’t care if producing profit entails human suffering. And he doesn’t care to see that the broader suffering of Colorado Springs is a result not of excessive expenditure but of inadequate resources.

Cities can’t do much about problems like these because they can’t deficit spend. The federal government can. So the question is, do we want the US as a whole to become Colorado Springs? Or do we want the government to spend now as an investment in the future, to rebuild the tax base, put people to work at good jobs, and come out on the other side with something better?

Tags: recession, taxes