The Staunton News-Leader editorializes about Jerry Kilgore's tax referendum plan in the aptly-titled, "Abdication of reason." That pretty much sums it up.The thing is, putting tax increases to referendum may look like a darn good thing to do at first glance, since referenda are the original democracy. And a democracy is what we are, right?
Well, in case you weren't paying attention in school when they went over civics, we live in a representative democracy, meaning we have our elected officials decide what is best. Virginia doesn't have direct mob rule, or vox populi.
Unfortunately, the Kilgore crowd is unclear on this concept. As a result, instead of forcing themselves to actually consider fiscal sanity, Kilgore and his budget-busting acolytes have decided that they'll chuck revenue responsibility to the people. Instead of making hard, informed choices for Virginia's future, Jerry Kilgore just throws up his hands, and says, "Hey, I'm not going to make the hard choices -- let someone ELSE figure it out!"
What this boils down to is a cowardly escape hatch--under Kilgore's plan, if our budget goes down the latrine, the General Assembly and the Governor can simply shrug their shoulders and pass the hard choice on to the voters.
You may not want to hear this, my fellow Virginians, but we are an insatiable money pit. We demand all kinds of outlandish things -- like roads, schools, utilities, fire protection, and public safety. But when faced with paying for ourselves, we balk.
"NO TAXES!! NO TAXES!!"
You know, there's a good reason why we didn't give the decision to go to war to draftees. Why not? Because they wouldn't have gone! For the same reason, we don't allow direct mob rule over our finances, because we'd go right down the fiscal toilet.
Example? In 2002, a half-cent sales tax increase came before the residents of Northern Virginia to fund transportation. A vigorous tax-free-or-die campaign sprang up and shot it down. Now Metro continues to scrounge for table scraps (its uniquely precarious predicament was outlined by the Brookings Institution), we're stuck in gridlock, and we have no money to deal with it.
The bottom line is that we pay our elected officials the big bucks to make hard choices, not to pass those bucks back to us. Then, if they want to spend like crazy, they also need to figure out how to pay for it -- not figure out how to leave the decision to somebody else.