Main Street

Arizona’s Choice: Raise Taxes or Cut Services

We saw what happened when Colorado Springs ran out of money:

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.

Now Arizona is finding out:

Arizona has the largest budget gap in the country when measured as a percentage of its overall budget, and the state Department of Transportation was $100 million in the red last fall when it decided to close 13 of the state’s 18 highway rest stops.

But the move has unleashed a torrent of telephone calls and e-mail messages to state lawmakers, newspapers and the Department of Transportation deploring the lost toilets — one of the scores of small indignities among larger hardships that residents of embattled states face as governments scramble to shore up their finances.

And some people continue to refuse the cause-and-effect nature of the closures:

“I honestly think they are setting us up because they want to do a tax increase,” Ms. Roberts said. “I think by shutting down things people want, they will give us one.”

Well, maybe….sorta. If the state doesn’t have enough money, something has to be shut down. Once you get past a few minor cuts here and there, if the state still doesn’t have enough money, it’s going to have to move on to something people want. Yes, the way to avoid that is to raise taxes. But it’s not some sort of revenge. It’s just the way budgeting works.

But people really don’t seem to get that. The constant anti-tax refrain of the Republican party masks another truth: People don’t want services to be cut. After all, the American National Election Study found in 2008 that less than 25% of even self-identified conservatives want to see cuts in things like “protecting the environment,” “aid to the poor,” “public schools,” and “building and repairing highways.” Never mind things like Social Security.

In Arizona and Colorado Springs, among other places, they’re learning that at a certain point, it’s raise taxes or have valued services cut. Hopefully people are figuring that out, despite the Republican party’s efforts to get us all to believe that we can have our cake and eat it too.

Tags: budget cuts, taxes