RALEIGH – Can an individual or group be both cash-strapped and prone to spend with reckless abandon?
Listen to a public debate about state or local government sometime and you get the impression that the answer to this question is assume to be “no.” Officials trying to deflect attempts at budget savings often cite examples of their inability to make payroll or preserve core functions as proof that they need more money.
The indispensable Tara Servatius, writing in Charlotte’s Creative Loafing weekly newspaper, offered a classic case of such bureaucratic pleading. “Last year during budget time,” she wrote, “the [Mecklenburg] Parks and Rec Department wailed about how poor city kids could be deprived of pools for the summer, softball leagues, and more if taxpayers didn’t cover a $32 million county budget gap. Naturally, the commissioners raised taxes.”
That’s usually where these kinds of stories end. I’ve seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. If you don’t fork over more tax money, bureaucrats say, the federal government will have to close down the Washington Monument, state government won’t be able to send state troopers out to patrol the highways during holiday travel time, and local government will have to house schoolchildren in Quonset huts. The pitch works, taxpayers’ pockets get picked again, and then – nothing.
Servatius, however, kept paying attention in the Mecklenburg case. Now, she reports, the Parks and Rec Department appears to have enough cash to offer tummy-toning classes at $1 per (probably a slight subsidy there) and yoga classes for free. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that poor inner-city kids make up a relatively small share of these classes.
Set aside for the moment the question of whether a county should be in the recreation business at all. Even if it should be, there is surely no justification for using tax money to subsidize activities mostly benefiting households of average or above-average income, and which are routinely offered to paying customers in the private marketplace.
Similarly, county libraries complain every budget cycle about inadequate facilities, staff cutbacks, and insufficient funds to replenish their shelves. But the only possible justification for taxpayer support for libraries is an educational one, a kind of extension of the local school system for children and adults who don’t have the financial wherewithal to purchase their own books or share them among friends and family.
So why do public libraries offer movies and books-on-tape? Why do they stock comic books (a personal fave, admittedly), romance novels, and in some cases risqué or prurient material? I don’t care what people read or watch in the privacy of their homes, but there is no conceivable rationale for forcing others to pay for it – and for using scarce resources for such items while pleading poverty when it comes to buying reference materials, histories, biographies, math and science texts, great works of literature, and similar fare.
Servatius ended her column by speculating that the Mecklenburg Parks and Red might next decide to offer buns-of-steel classes. All I have left to say on this topic is a warning, to Tara: please don’t give them any ideas.
Oh, and this: of course you can be cash-strapped and reckless in your spending. The two go together like government lobbyists and hyperbole.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.