Oh, baloney!!!....

There weren’t a lot of extra-curricular activities when I attended Millville Grade School. Occasionally we would load onto Howard Tucker’s bus and ride over to Ashland or Dalton for a softball game. Once in a while we would head over to Memorial Park for a picnic, and to gather specimens for our leaf collections. I suppose students are still allowed to have picnics, but I imagine by now collecting leaves in the park without a permit of some sort would lead to a violation of some law or statute.

Our picnics consisted of bag lunches that we brought from home, mostly sandwiches and potato chips. This was back before peanut butter cost $8.00 a jar, when jelly was homemade, and before we knew how to spell baloney or what it was made from. It was a pretty safe bet what your bag was going to contain when it was time to eat.

But my old pal, Stinky Wilmont, drew a great deal of pleasure from convincing other students to swap lunches with him. He always found someone willing to make a trade, but I never saw the attraction. Regardless of what Stinky and the others were hoping for, they were still going to end up with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or a bologna sandwich. And no matter how many times you made the switch, the outcome was always the same.

Governor Daniels and our state legislators are involved in the same sort of swap fest over in Indianapolis right now. After a great amount of public outcry and voter unrest over the property tax debacle, our lawmakers have decided to make some changes. They have decided to collect a little less property tax and a little more sales tax. Most likely they are going to swap some elected officials for some appointed officials, and some elected assessors for some hired assessors. Some of them want to trade small government schools for large government schools.

Maybe their original plan might have been to make the unfair property tax a little less unfair, and to make the arbitrary assessment system a little less arbitrary, but their new plan still allows people living in identical homes and with identical incomes to pay different amounts of property taxes based on a person’s age. And it allows identical homes in the same neighborhood to be taxed at different rates depending on who lives in the home.

The Governor and our legislators want us to believe that they can reduce our total tax bill without reducing their spending. That somehow a temporary decrease in property taxes coupled with a permanent increase in sales taxes, or that replacing elected bureaucrats with appointed bureaucrats can somehow make the bottom line that citizens pay to the government more affordable.

Sorry Mitch, but like I used to tell Stinky, that’s a bunch of baloney.