Falling leaves
and rising taxes

The war never ends. Turn back an incursion one day, and you’ll find yourself facing another the next. Continual aerial bombardment buries all signs of life and forces us to devote far too much effort to a hopeless cause.

No, I’m not talking about Gaza or Ukraine or even, God forbid, Venezuela, if it becomes the replacement for immigrants, tariffs, shutdowns, and Jeffrey Epstein as the topic du jour on talking head “news” shows and hatemongering, anti-social media “news” feeds.

The front lines are in our backyards. It’s our annual war against falling leaves.

The only one who seems to enjoy the war is my feline roommate, Zenger. Like a dutiful soldier, he regularly sits on guard at my patio door, loudly and futilely clawing at the glass to get out and pounce on each new leaf as it falls.

I wish that he — and everyone reading this — would realize there’s another, equally futile war going on in Marion County. It’s an all-encompassing upheaval with a familiar and echoing battle cry: Economic development.

Lots of good people put in lots of good time and effort in the battle, but as with our battle against falling leaves, an enemy in plain sight sabotages their efforts.

The enemy is a foe we already hate: taxes. But so far, no one has seemed willing to take on the opponent that prevents us from winning the battle for economic development.

As reported last week, property taxes in Marion County are the highest among any of the seven counties adjacent to it. The effective tax rate in Marion County is 30% higher than in Saline County, 23% higher than in McPherson County, 21% higher than in Dickinson County, even 10% higher than in smaller Morris County.

If you’re a businessperson looking to locate in this part of the state, what would attract you to our county instead of the others? Better roads? Hardly. More well-trained and available workers? Not if you’ve tried to hire anyone.

We can go on deluding ourselves into believing we’re friendlier and harder working that our competitors in neighboring counties, but it just isn’t so.

Our biggest problem is governments overly willing to spend on whatever it takes to keep government employees happy. That includes salaries inflated well beyond what local businesses can afford, pension benefits so generous that no private company could match them, lavish parties and clothing, and costly contracts and equipment to accomplish tasks that private businesses would use existing staff and equipment to do instead.

Visiting a government office the other day, I noticed that receptionists in a recently and handsomely remodeled lobby were using fancy new laptop computers. Laptops tend to cost more and don’t last as long as desktops. Why a receptionist would need portability is beyond me.

Then I see that the laptop is connected to a separate monitor, a separate keyboard, and a separate mouse rather than what’s built into the machine. Configured that way, probably by a costly consultant, the machines should be set up so that a cash register “ka-ching” sounds every time a key is touched.

We’re not going to lower taxes just by avoiding frivolous computer purchases or even by adopting policies that don’t automatically replace as outmoded older equipment that would continue to serve a taxpayer just fine, but that tax-spenders insist is antiquated.

We need to get to the root cause of all this spending — a desire to make government run without extra effort, as smoothly as the railroads. We forget that most railroads have endured bankruptcies, sometimes several times over.

When government hires a contractor to out-source billing, why does it always seem to keep all its billing clerks? If we have too many roads to maintain, why keep some of them open? If we have to have separate vehicles because some employees will trash them, why not get rid of the trashers instead of getting more vehicles so they don’t have to share?

The list goes on, but you can tell at a glance that fixing these problems won’t be popular.

The pioneer spirit that settled this county was one of living within means, making do with what we had, and working just a bit harder rather than looking for more days off and greater creature comforts.

The democratic spirit that kept the county going for more than a century and a half demands politicians willing to make hard choices that might result in them being un-elected. It also requires voters willing to hold them accountable rather than accepting mumbo-jumbo excuses for why saving money isn’t possible.

Forget hot-button national and state issues. If enlightened conservatives who long have dominated Marion County politics want to make this county truly great again, the first step will be zero-based budgeting, in which government doesn’t just automatically spend every last cent is has spent in the past and re-justifies every continuing expenditure.

In Marion County, Hillsboro seems to have come the closest to doing things right. Its effective tax rate is 5% less than Goessel’s, 17% less than Marion’s, 20% less than Florence’s, and 26% less than Peabody’s.

Cutting taxes pays dividends. Continually adding to them results in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. But doing without the not completely necessary things that excessive taxes buys requires politicians willing to make hard choices — and voters willing to insist that they do.

— Eric Meyer