THE BIG STORY
Money Matters
BY RICK BOETTGER
KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER
Today I am going to lambast all of our governments—the county, the city, and the school district—for hoarding—no, make that stealing—hundreds of millions of dollars of our cash and property for no good reason, just because they can. But to get you to believe this audacious charge, I shall first puff myself up like a peacock, by displaying my economic chops.
In 1994 I wrote a book on the national economy, The Deficit Lie: Exposing the Myth of the National Debt. Luckily, it got printed by the first publishing house I showed it to. It didn’t make me rich or famous, but it was read in Washington, and the 100+ TV and radio appearances I made for it led to my hosting a 25-state talk radio show on the political economy.
I got so burned out about talking about it I quit and ran away to Key West in 1996. I’ve written about my economic ideas occasionally here, but not much, and I’m not going to get into it again today. But exciting news for me is that there is a wave of economic thought, much of it by new econ PhD’s, in general agreement with my central thesis that fighting so-called federal “deficits” is horrendously wrong.
I now hope to see fiscal sanity and prosperity in my lifetime, and I am becoming a small part of it again. My most avid fan was a Fortune 500 executive when he read my book. He said it “slapped him upside the head.” He retired early, got a PhD in economics, and wrote a blog successful enough to earn a position as a regular columnist for the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative think tank.
He has been on a year-long hiatus from the column in order to write his own book. I’m doing the final edits with him, and he’ll be coming down here to put it to bed, and for me to give him practice for the media interviews. My work is quoted reverentially, so I’m getting back in the game nationally.
Now that you must think I’m smarter than you thought just a few minutes ago, maybe you’ll believe what I’m going to say about our local governments’ reserve funds and property holdings. First, the reserves, tenderly misnamed “rainy day funds.” This is money your government takes out of your bank and puts into theirs, not because they have any need for it at all, but just in case they might need it later.
This is outrageous. Our governments have the power to take our money when they need it. It’s called collecting a tax, and raising it if there is a need. To take my money earning between 5% and 12% and put it in their money market earning 1%, and let our hundreds of millions sit around like this in perpetuity, should make every tax-paying citizen angry.
Instead, too many fiscal conservatives somehow think it is cool that their government has a big pile of cash they have no intention of spending. This baffles me. Especially since even when it “rains,” they don’t spend it. In the recent Great Depression, our local governments were given federal dollars meant to be spent to stimulate the economy. Recession. That’s a “rainy day.” But no, they put the money in the bank earning that 1% instead of spending it in the local economy.
Another huge waste by private sector standards is the half billion dollars worth of real property they own all over the Keys they have no intention of using. We need them to sell or even give away this property so it can be used in the private economy and generate more taxes, reducing pressure on my tax bill.
If you have a big pile of spare cash, that’s a good thing. If you want to own unused property, hooray for you, especially since you’re paying taxes on it. But when our government does it, they don’t win, while we are the losers.
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There is an old axiom, which states that you can’t fight city hall. It’s not the elected officials who are in charge, they are merely a series of ever-changing sock puppet heads on the hand that controls the economy.
Let’s give the hand a name, we’ll call it the “organization” and it’s made up of upper and middle managers who manipulate policy and put the requisite documents before the elected official who signs whatever he or she is told. Seldom does the official bother to read the reams of boilerplate generated to support the document requiring a signature.
Most sock puppet heads, we’ll call the politicians, (a name derived from “poly” meaning many, and tics, blood-sucking parasites) only exist to be elected and campaign to be elected. Essentially, they are nothing more than entertainers.
The management of the organization is safe from removal by elections, which only affects the sock puppet heads, and continues rolling along raping the pockets of the public who are powerless to effect any change short of a bloody revolution, which is highly unlikely when one considers the the same power structure exists within the police departments and the military; besides, they have all the bombs, machine guns, and riot gear needed to quell any uprising.
In essence, like every version of democracy since the first on in Athens Greece, our system has been corrupted by those few, the power brokers, who have found a way to manipulate the system for their own purposes at the sufferance of the many.
Getting angry won’t help. Electing a new sock puppet head won’t help.
If you’re looking for a solution, good luck!