Voice in the Wilderness

Have you seen the new Fox series "Over There", supposedly about an Army outfit in Iraq, and suspect it may be full of hooey? Check out this incisive critique by Faces from the Front (hat tip to the Swanky Conservative). Faces from the Front confirms that "Over There" does indeed take a "sharp left turn from reality." Read the whole post.

Faces from the Front and the reports from Michael Yon are must reads for anyone who wants to see what is really happening in Iraq, not the MSM's filtered and spun view.

City Mandarins Repackage Old Nostrums in the Austin City Budget

Put on your reading glasses and fire up your spreadsheet programs….the City of Austin has published its proposed budget for 2005-2006. All of us in the Austin blogosphere can now review the recommendations made by our city mothers and fathers. We will also get a chance to advise them on their budget priorities every Thursday until September 1.

Sadly, they did not start on a good note. The transmittal letter robotically recites various forms of the phrase “strategic reinvestment”, a euphemism for increased spending on all manner of city government initiatives. Thus, one bit of advice they desperately need to hear is that they ought not “strategically reinvest” in the shopworn and failed liberal policy initiatives extant in the budget. In reading the press reports of the budget just published, three red flags immediately emerge.

First, the $750K Midtown Live pay-off has been reincarnated as an “African American Quality of Life” initiative. As I blogged about last March, the public furor over the Midtown Live pay-off would only delay the City Council’s impulse to prostrate themselves under the NAACP hammer. This initiative is an incredibly patronizing attempt by the mainly white, liberal City leadership to infantilize the city’s black community. According to the budget’s transmittal letter, City Manager Toby Futrell said:

"Austin is a growing city, yet the African American share of the total population has declined and is now less than 10 percent. …”

Maybe this reduction in the percentage of the population has something to do with the sharp increase of people from other states and countries? Or maybe it has something to do with many people in the black community moving to Pflugerville, Round Rock, and Cedar Park? Futrell further fulminates:

“This past year, I initiated a study to help determine whether the quality of life in Austin for African Americans is different from that of other Austinites, and to learn whether it differs markedly from the quality of life for African Americans in other cities. ...Survey data also suggested that Austin does not have viable social and cultural opportunities for working and middle class African American singles and couples.”

This is so disingenuous and demeaning. Everyone who’s been paying attention knows this “study” was a pretext for doling out more taxpayer goodies to the local, “civil rights” (I use that term loosely here) machine in exchange for not suing over the allegedly insensitive comments by Austin police during the Midtown Live fire. Furthermore, this idea that the black community cannot develop its own social institutions without the beneficient hand of the city government is cultural feudalism, making the black community the vassals in the city leaders’ aristocracy. I predict whatever “cultural opportunities” come out of this effort will be boring and mediocre at best because they will represent City Hall’s view of what African American culture should be. Will white liberals ever stop their preternatural condescension to minority communities?

The second disturbing item in the budget is the “preservation of green space and acquisition of parkland” in the upcoming bond election. While that sounds innocuous, it demands closer scrutiny given the Mayor’s and City Council’s recent genuflection at the global environmental altar, the UN’s Urban Environmental Accords.

These accords require signatories to “adopt urban planning principles and practices that advance higher density” and “adopt and enforce land-use policies that reduce sprawl, preserve open space, and create compact, walk able urban communities”. These saccharine platitudes are code words for highly regulated and communal residential development that would severely impact home and family life as we know it. It seems liberals never lose the collectivist impulse.

Third, the city recommends a tax increase. According to a recent News 8 report:

“Austin is proposing a 43.95-cent tax rate. That's lower than last year's rate, but it will generate more revenue because property values have increased over the past year. It comes out to $33.65 more on your property tax bill, for the average home value of $191,000.”

More nickel and diming the local citizen to death. The school bond election raises property tax rates a little here, the hospital district raises a little there. Pretty soon, it adds up to full month's salary. Don't the state and feds already take enough? Why does the city need to take the circuitous, taxation-by-valuation approach? How does the value of a particular property increase the cost of city services consumed by the property owner? Why does the city need this extra revenue anyway? To whom is the city writing checks? How does Austin compare in local taxation and local government spending to comparably sized cities? What public administration best practices are these cities using that Austin could adopt?

Over the next several days, I will investigate these issues and others as I examine the over 1600 pages of documents accompanying the proposed city budget and attempt to answer the age old questions:

• Where is the money coming from?
• Where is the money going?
• What are we getting for it?