Letter to the Editor: Taxes shouldn’t fund crony capitalism

ByLetter to the Editor Reading Time: 2 minutes

We at Freedom Makers of Dubois County wish to point out a very important issue which we strongly believe in, fiscal conservatism.

How should city and county government taxes be spent?

Recently, there has been a lot of public discussion regarding Jasper’s Library-Arts complex, Jasper Cabinet Building potential uses, and The Parklands.

Huntingburg has the Stellar City program mostly funded by Tax Increment Finances, Economic Development Income Taxes (EDIT), and STELLAR matching funds. Historically, local governments spend your tax money on roads, schools, libraries, fire and police departments, parks, youth sports and activities on behalf of the people within the boundaries of that government.

Tax revenue should not fund ventures that would bring the government into direct competition with private enterprise. Neither should it be handed over to private enterprise. Both of these are sides of the same crony capitalistic coin.

What should Tax Increment Finance (TIF) be used to fund? Should we be seeking to use tax revenue to fund private ventures? Huntingburg has six different TIFs that range in age up to 25 years. They have not recently been used to fund town projects and have sat idle collecting tax revenue.

Why weren’t they voted out of existence so to return tax revenue to the school corporation, county government, and the airport?

Why are most of our EDIT funds mostly being used for standard budget items or the growth of government?

If we add up all the end of December 2014, the accumulated EDIT and TIF balances in the Jasper, Huntingburg, Ferdinand, Holland, Birdseye, and Dubois County government:

TIF: $5.33 million
EDIT: $16.8 million

Additionally, you can then look at the total cash on hand tax revenue from those entities: $73.6 million (or ~$1750 per every individual in the county). As you can see, our government is very well funded.

To drive economic development, instead of using tax revenue via EDIT or TIF, should we reduce the rate of income and property taxes? Should we reduce the size and scope of government and let private enterprise address the issues at hand? We have choices, fiscal conservatism or debt driving crony capitalism.

As our county seeks to grow, we need to do it wisely, together and on what is appropriate.

Current and former Freedom Maker of Dubois County leadership,
Adrian Engelberth
Michael Lewinsky
Larry Jones
Brady Werne
Deb Burroughs

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