At last, an HONEST public official: Here in Illinois, the legislature passed the County Schools Facility Occupation Tax Law in 2007 to provide a way for school districts to generate money through sales taxes collected within the county. Governor Rod Blagojevich vetoed it, one of his few acts that I would agree with, although his reasoning was that the new money should be generated through a statewide capital plan rather than sales taxes. He wanted to increase money for public schools but by raising it in other ways besides a sales tax. However, the legislature overrode his veto. Anyway, with the new law in effect, Marion County, where we live, had a one-percent sales tax increase for the county schools on the ballot this past month. Our local newspaper, the Salem Times-Commoner, reported on Oct. 24, 2008, that "Salem City Manager Thomas Christie told the Salem City Council on Monday that the proposed one-percent sales tax increase that would help fund area schools could be a serious detriment to the local economy." Christie said, "I fear that businesses that are already operating marginally, due to our negative national economy, may very well go under. The others will face even lower profit margins, forcing them to lay off employees or cut back on operating hours." With this feeling that the salex tax increase would put local businesses on an uneven playing field with retailers in surrounding counties, "He also noted that the tax increase could hinder the city's economic development efforts to encourage new and expanded retail developments." Finally, a public official who actually understands the net effect of tax increases!

     Let me tell you a story about that: Since the advent of compulsory school attendance laws, the primary vehicle for funding public schools has been the property tax. When the educational bureaucrats and their willing accomplices in the government found that they had wrung that turnip for about all it was worth and people were voting property taxes down like swatting flies, they turned to sales taxes, income taxes, state funding, "gaming," and other attempts at wealth redistribution to fund their pet projects. Shortly after we moved to Dayton, OH, probably around 1991 or so, the Dayton Public Schools put a property tax increase on the ballot to increase funding for the schools. They ran frightening commercials about how the property values in Dayton had taken a nosedive several years before when the schools had gotten bad and argued that they needed the increased funds to keep that from happening again. Since we had just bought our first house, I was understandably concerned with property values, even though we had no children of school age at that time and had already pretty well decided that we were going to homeschool anyway, and under the motto "love thy neighbor as thyself," knowing that most people do depend on the public schools for the education of their children, I voted for the increase. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me! The DPS turned right around and used a large portion of that tax increase to give the superintendent something like a $50,000 a year raise (most people in Dayton didn't even make $50,000 a year!) because he was such a good administrator and they wanted him to stay in Dayton rather than move somewhere else where he could make more money. What really frosted me was that two or three years later this same superintendent resigned in disgrace for having conspired with the DPS treasurer to engage in "creative bookkeeping" to make it appear that the Dayton Public Schools were solvent when in fact they were going bankrupt. That did it for me. I determined that I would never, under any circumstances, ever vote for a tax increase for schools again--period (and indeed, generally vote against almost any tax increase). So far as I am concerned, the public school system is totally corrupt and broken and no amount of money can fix it. In fact, giving more money to public schools is like throwing good money after bad down a rat hole. So, I suppose that you can guess how I voted on the Marion County sales tax increase. It failed.