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Mad
Hatter’s Tea Party
Anti-tax
zealots
in
Fairfax County are
protesting
property taxes,
but the
logic of
their tea party invites comparisons
to
Alice in Wonderland, not the remonstration in
Boston Harbor.
Political
signage is sprouting across
Fairfax
County,
including little green signs that read, "No
tax increase," topped by little red signs that
read, "76 cents." In a season usually
devoted to dogwood and wisteria, azaleas and
tulips, what gives?
The
signs, it turns out, belong to the Fairfax County
Taxpayer Alliance, which again is serving up
charges of government waste and high taxes as conspiracies facing more than a million
residents of Virginia's largest and richest
political jurisdiction. That Fairfax
County
has been named one of the best governed and most
efficiently run local governments in America
with the highest achieving schools in the
Commonwealth doesn't seem to matter. Nor does the Alliance
care that it has posted
the signs illegally in the
median strips of major intersections.
The
Alliance
contends the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has raised property
taxes illegally. Rather than
cut the tax rate by five cents to $1.16 per $100
of assessed value, as the board did in April, the
Alliance
claims the county should reduce the rate to $0.76.
Further, chimes in the Virginia Club for Growth in
publicizing anti-tax tea parties in Fairfax
County
April
26 and in Loudoun County May 21, candidates for
local office are being asked to sign the following
pledge about the future to limit any future
increases:
"I
hereby pledge that I will not vote to increase
total real estate property tax revenues in Fairfax
County each year more than 5 percent, or the rate of
growth of population plus inflation, whichever is
higher."
Such
pledges at first glance always seem
simple. The rationale is that tax bills shouldn't
rise and tax increases should be capped. The
implication is that the government just cannot be
using "all that money" wisely and,
therefore, revenue cuts -- $560 million in Fairfax
County
-- won't keep government from doing essential
things. Finally, the pledges suggest that even
when elected by voters, office holders cannot
trust themselves or be trusted to manage well.
Representative government, therefore, must give
way to ideological government with tenets set out
by a small minority of
citizens.
The
problem, of course, is that these familiar Northern
Virginia
anti-tax zealots -- Arthur Purves, Peter Ferrara and
James Parmalee -- really argue politics more than the
law, and ideology more than economics. If these
unyielding activists really thought Fairfax
County
has
proceeded illegally, they would sue the
county. Instead, their answer is the pledge, which
not surprisingly has been signed by candidates
they have put forward from their anti-tax wing of
the Republican Party.
Free
from the imperatives of economics, they can
ignore facts. In their world, demand for services
is static. The economic pie is finite. Counties
need to live within the means of the people who
live in them, they argue, without mentioning that
residents of Fairfax
County
have the highest per household income in the
United States.
The
Northern
Virginia
region's per capita income is the highest in Virginia
and exceeds the national average by 35 percent.
Unemployment in
Northern Virginia
now is 2.8 percent.
Property
taxes are taking a bigger and bigger percentage of
family income, they argue, without acknowledging
that record low interest rate re-financings of home
mortgages are saving Fairfax
County
homeowners savings of hundreds of dollars a month.
Per-household income from federal income tax cuts
and Virginia
car-tax reimbursements have increased more than
property tax payments, which also can be deducted
from federal income taxes.
Homeowners
in Northern
Virginia,
moreover, do not prefer that their property values
stagnate or decline. Houses are investments, too.
Citizens who demand the highest quality of
services and actually see value-driven increases
in property taxes as one of the only ways to keep
up with exploding school enrollments and for
property protectors, such as police, firefighters
and public health professionals, to keep up with
threats from snipers, terrorists and SARS. At the
rate the anti-taxers advocate, Fairfax County
citizens can see 76 students per classroom, 76
more trailers at county schools, libraries open 76
minutes a day and 76 police and fire fighter
layoffs a month.
The
most devout anti-taxers also ignore forecasts.
Methodical, conservative economist Christine
Chmura in Richmond, for example, projects that
wages and salaries in Northern Virginia will rise
by 4.5 percent in 2003 and by 7.9 percent in 2004.
Retail sales are to rise by 7.3 percent in 2003
and 9.7 percent in 2004. Building permits rose 11
percent in 2002 and are forecast to rise another
seven percent in 2003. These positive economic dynamics
explain why a special public hearing by the
Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to hear
citizen complaints against increased property tax
bills drew only six anti-tax acolytes in
opposition to the proposed five cent reduction.
For
the record, trying to throw a Boston Tea Party
blanket over little green and red signs also
misses the point of the "taxation without
representation" protests of 1773. There was
plenty of representation in an 8-2 vote by elected
supervisors, just not the result the zealots
wanted. Since contributors to Bacon's Rebellion
are required to know their protests top to bottom,
I would add that the British back then actually thought
the colonists would go for the lower overall price
of tea that came from cutting out the middlemen,
even though a tax was involved.
Finally,
the "76" sign actually conjured up for
some not the Boston Tea Party, but the more
classic image of the card in the hatband of the
Mad Hatter at his tea party in Alice
in Wonderland.
"Have
you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said,
turning to Alice again. "No, I give it
up," Alice replied: "that's the
answer?"
"I
haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice
signed wearily. "I think you might do
something better with the time," she said,
"than waste it in asking riddles that have no
answers."
If
anti-tax Republican candidates for the Fairfax
County Board of Supervisors are going to tap into
a deep well of taxpayer resentment in November,
they'll have to spend a lot more time and money
finding or filling a well. Of course, by fall they
may have moved on to the Queen's croquet ground, a
very different chapter, indeed.
--
April
28, 2003
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