Defining Our Terms

Anti-tax fervor has become a defining aspect of American politics—so much so, that here in Indiana we are getting ready to enshrine a so-called “property tax cap” in the state’s Constitution. (The existing law imposing such a cap is evidently considered inadequate.)  Those of us who question the wisdom of such a measure are often accused of being “for” taxes—a clearly incomprehensible position.

Let me pose a question. What is a tax? Do we know one when we see one?

The answer begins with the simple premise that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Goods and services cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere. If the city picks up your garbage, payment comes from your taxes; if you employ a private scavenger service, you pay for pickup directly. There may be economies of scale that make the city service cheaper or there may not, but however the service is provided, it has to be paid for.

Policymakers face a series of questions. The first, and most important, is whether a service needs to be provided at all. What is the benefit to a community of garbage collection, or bus service, or libraries? Do we require police and fire services? A sports arena?

In some cases, the public benefit is obvious. If we don’t collect the garbage, we risk the public health; if we don’t provide fire protection, public safety suffers.  Of course, we could simply require that property owners buy these services on the open market; in fact, many communities used to do just that. These and other public services were “socialized”—that is, they were provided communally—because it was cheaper and more efficient to have government provide them. They didn’t suddenly become “free”—we just paid for them differently.

If we want services, we have to pay for them. Calling that payment a “user fee” or a “utility bill” doesn’t change that. We can certainly debate whether we really need a particular service—some people would be perfectly happy to dispense with massive sports stadiums, others would cheerfully do without libraries. But if we do want them—and our streets paved, our neighborhoods policed and our parks mowed—we have to pay for them.

Transparency in government is considered a good thing because it allows voters to see what their elected officials are doing, and where their money is actually going. The problem with the current anti-tax fervor is that it penalizes transparency and rewards official game-playing.  Voters’ hostility to paying taxes—coupled with their insistence on continuing to receive services—sends elected officials a clear message: lie to us.

“Cap” our taxes and find “nontax revenue sources.” Shift expenses from operating to capital budgets, so you can borrow money to cover operating expenses. Blame the federal government for service cuts. Hide the street repair money in our utility bills.

It’s more costly when we do things that way—but the payments aren’t called taxes, and evidently that’s all that counts.

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Missing Hearts and Souls

I’m going to ask for the indulgence of my readers, and quote a relatively long excerpt from an article that recently appeared in the Miami New Times in the wake of revelations about George Rekers, a leading Christian Right figure. (If somehow you missed those revelations, the short version is that Dr. Holier-than-Thou visited “Rentaboy.com” and engaged the services of a male prostitute who accompanied him on a European trip. To—ahem—“carry luggage.”) Here’s the excerpt:

“In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old “effeminate boy” named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a “play-observation room” with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, “On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him… Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room.”

Rekers’s research team continued the experiment in the family’s home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a “swat” or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family’s home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.

After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as “the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy.”

At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers’s poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke. Rekers, whose early experiments were the first to ostensibly demonstrate a “gay cure,” resigned from the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) last week, after it was revealed the gay escort had given him nude sexual massages. NARTH, however, stands by his science.”

It is one thing to diagnose Dr. Rekers; self-hate and projection explain a lot. I have a different question. What in the world was wrong with those parents?

My husband and I have five children and four grandchildren. Believe me, I know how easy it can be to react badly to childish provocations, how hard it is to parent adequately. I’ve second-guessed my own mothering skills more times than I can remember. That said, however, I can’t imagine treating any child the way these people treated this little boy, even for behaviors that we would all see as unequivocally and objectively wrong. Here, there was no dangerous or destructive behavior; the child was simply “effeminate,” whatever that means. Where is it written that being effeminate is a trait to be scorned or an affliction to be cured? What is it about the prospect of a child growing up gay that is so terrifying that it justifies the infliction of such unbelievable emotional abuse?

In the years since he came out, my son has periodically shared heartrending stories about friends or acquaintances whose parents rejected them. Many of them came from “religious” families—families in which “bible-believing” is a euphemism for self-righteousness, rigidity and intolerance. Some of these young people were later able to overcome the damage and achieve a measure of self-acceptance; others never did. Some haven’t spoken to their parents in years. Some developed substance-abuse problems. Others engaged in risky sexual behaviors, or gave other indications of self-loathing.

I think about all the people who cannot conceive, about the couples who wait years to adopt a child, about loving adults who want nothing more than to nurture and rear a child—and then I wonder at the unfairness of a world in which fertile people procreate easily and then abandon, neglect or mistreat the human beings entrusted to their care.

I try to understand, but I never will.

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Constitution 101

A few years ago, the American Constitution Center conducted a poll to assess the country’s constitutional literacy, and drew a depressing conclusion: Americans revere the Constitution, but have virtually no idea what it says or means.

 If that conclusion seems a bit “over the top,” consider some of the more indignant reactions to two recent court opinions applying the religion clauses of the First Amendment. In a case close to home, Judge Sarah Evans Barker ruled that a public high school’s graduating class could not vote to have prayer at its official ceremony.  A decision with more national scope held that a Presidential designation of a Day of Prayer is improper. I found the homegrown case particularly ironic, since I invented a virtually identical fact situation a few years ago, and have been using it as part of my midterm exam. Unlike the school officials involved, my students almost always recognize that the issue is not whether students may pray, but whether the government can sponsor prayer.

In a recent column, Russ Pulliam declared that the founders did not want to eject religion from the public square. True. There is an important difference, however, between the public square and the public sector—a difference that evidently eludes many Americans.

There are two religion clauses in the First Amendment. One—the Establishment Clause—prohibits government from sponsoring, endorsing, favoring or otherwise getting involved with religion. The second—the Free Exercise Clause—forbids government from interfering with individuals’ voluntary expression of religion. Together, those clauses send a message to government: hands off.

If you want to take religion into the public square, you are absolutely free to do so. You can post religious verses on your house, wear tee shirts with religious messages, hand out religious handbills on the public streets, place religious messages in newspapers or magazines, or hold revivals in public parks. If you have the means, you can buy a television network and broadcast religious messages 24/7. You can engage in these and innumerable other religious activities in the public square and agencies of government will be constitutionally prohibited from interfering.

If, however, you want the public sector (government) to weigh in—if you want a publicly-owned building to post your bible verse, a government official to endorse or lead your prayer, or a legislative body to ensure that your neighbors are behaving in accordance with your religious beliefs, you have a constitutional problem, because the Establishment Clause prevents any group of citizens, no matter how numerous, from using the power of the state to impose their religious beliefs on other citizens.  Your neighbors cannot take a vote to make you an Episcopalian or a Baptist or a Muslim, and the senior class cannot vote to have an agency of government—the public schools—impose a religious observance on those attending the graduation ceremony.

We should all have learned the difference between the public sector and the public square in Government 101. Unfortunately, too many of us skipped class.

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Political Con Game

The incessant political ads leading up to the primaries all seemed to assume that we voters are either children or idiots. Every candidate for every office will protect our perks and cut our taxes! For the record, guys, most of us know there is no such thing as a free lunch. We know—or we should know—that if we want government services, we have to pay for them, and that actually might mean paying taxes.

 On the other hand, perhaps the candidates are right. Perhaps we are children.

 Look at what is happening in Indianapolis right now: Six libraries are closing.  IndyGo—already one of the country’s most inadequate bus systems—is cutting out additional routes. My own neighborhood, the Old Northside, is working with other downtown neighborhoods on a plan to hire private police to supplement IMPD. In too many places, our streets and sidewalks are disintegrating. And don’t even look at the condition of our parks.

 When I worked for city government, back in the days when Bill Hudnut was mayor, there was a recognition that city services had to be paid for, and that there were better and worse ways to do that. Sinking funds (savings accounts) were preferable to bonds (borrowing from future taxpayers) for operating costs. Ongoing maintenance of infrastructure was more cost-effective than cycles of neglect and repair.

 The Hudnut Administration wasn’t perfect, but it was probably the last Indianapolis administration to operate on a pay-as-you-go basis.

 Hudnut was succeeded by Stephen Goldsmith.  Goldsmith (recently installed as Deputy Mayor of New York) was very good at convincing people that he could deliver government on the cheap. “Privatization” initiatives were used to shift costs from the operating to the capital budget; debt was refinanced over longer periods; maintenance skimped or deferred. The Peterson Administration chose not to confront the dire fiscal problems it inherited, resisting even modest tax increases as long as possible. Ironically, when an increase could no longer be avoided, the timing was politically disastrous.

 The Ballard Administration has taken a leaf from the Goldsmith book. A simple transfer of our sewer and water utilities to Citizens Gas actually might make a lot of sense, fiscally as well as politically.  But as the Star recently documented, the up-front “payment” is nothing more than a deferred tax that will be paid by ratepayers in the future.

 The money to fix our decaying infrastructure has to come from somewhere, and our childish belief that we can expect something for nothing—a belief nurtured by years of dishonest political rhetoric—means the administration will not raise taxes directly. The problem is, when these “creative” tax mechanisms are employed, they end up being much more arbitrary and unfair than property or income taxes. In this case, ratepayers living in million-dollar homes will pay precisely the same amount as ratepayers living in hovels, so that we can pave our streets and fix our sidewalks without admitting that we are raising taxes.

 Shouldn’t we all just grow up?

How Small and Ugly Can We Get?

I received this email from a colleague with whom I team-teach classes from time to time. It speaks for itself.

“One of my IUPUI journalism students was enjoying coffee at a Greenwood, Indiana Starbucks while chatting with his friend José. They were speaking Spanish. A woman interrupted them saying, “You need to start speaking ‘American’ or go back to the hole in Mexico you came from.” My student laughed at her, an admirable response when confronted with blatant racism.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident for my student.  Carmel and Fishers police have stopped my student for DWB–driving with brown skin. Racial profiling is alive and well in Indiana. Indiana has a racist heritage that will take many more generations to be eradicated if, indeed, it will ever be eradicated. My only hope is the woman in this incident has no children to whom she can pass along her hatred of others.

At one time the Klan flourished in Indiana. Hangings were social events followed by pictures of the hangings being sent as post cards to friends. Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and many others of their ilk spout their opinions in inflammatory language. Sarah Palin knows who the “true” Americans are, according to her. Unfortunately, a climate of hate speech and lack of civility feeds the courage of those, like the Starbucks woman, who are prone to racism. She apparently speaks “American,” a language that I am not familiar with. My student is a winner of a highly competitive college scholarship who speaks three languages, including English, fluently. The woman who accosted him is fluent only in hate.”

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