Cheapskates and Swindlers

Lance Mannion, this morning:  Push them on it, ask them how they expect the government to do what it needs to do without spending the money it spends and they always have the same answer.  Waste.  The government's wasting their money. You can't trust politicians to spend money wisely.

But, really, they don't want the government to spend anything.  They think it should all come to them for free.  The water should flow from their tap, the cops and the firefigthers should come when they're called, the schools should teach their kids, the plows clear their roads and the crews come out to repair them for free.

If they can't have it for free, and you convince them they can't, a lot of them will be perfectly content not to have it.

They'll be glad to let services deteriorate.  The water can flow sluggish and brown from the tap.  The schools can be overcrowded, the teachers underpaid and demoralized, the plaster fall down on the students' desks while they try to read their out of date textbooks by inadequate lighting because there isn't enough money to pay janitors to change the burned out bulbs; the cops can not bother because they are overwhelmed and undermanned and are bothering somewhere else and can't be two places at once; the firefighters can be slow to respond; and the parks can disappear under weeds and trash, and they won't notice or care.

As long as it's someone else's tap, somebody else's kid's school, another, far away neighborhood, and a park where they don't walk their dog.

To be fair to the cheapskates with integrity, some of them won't even care when it's their services and neighborhoods going downhill.

Reason I'm on this kick today---sail up and down the length of the Hudson, along either shore, and there's only one town along the way where you can't put in at a town landing of some kind.

There's only one town whose residents can't get to the water to put a boat in, swim, or just look at and stare at what has to be the most gorgeous riverscape on earth.

The Town of Lloyd.

A little more than eight miles of waterfront within the town limits and no way to access it.

The reasons for this are accidents of history, aftereffects of the way the town grew and developed.  It's all private property.  But a lot of it isn't used.  It's not lying fallow.  It's been essentially thrown away.

For instance, there's a nice piece of property, used to be a deep-water terminal, all gone to weeds.  The owners have no plans for it and would be glad to be rid ot it.

Town would like to buy it.

Turn it into a park.

It was all set to.  They're still all set to.  But they've hit a snag.

Price tag was $650,000.  Town managed to secure enough grants that it will only have to pay around 40 grand of its own money.

Excuse me, the taxpayers' money.  And as we all know, only some people pay taxes.

Group comes along opposing buying the park.  They think the 650 thousand dollars is too much for the town to spend.  Apparently they can't be convinced that town isn't going to spend that much.

They circulated a petition and got enough signatures to force a referendum in the fall.

They say a referendum's the fair way to decide this.  People should have a say before the money is spent.  Of course fairness isn't what's on their mind.  I'm sure they'd tell you it's not the money, it's the principle.  But what do you think they'll say if the referendum passes?  Oh, good, democracy in action, let's go build that park?

One of them told the newspaper, "Everyone likes parks, but there are probably better things to fund."

He doesn't give an example of a better thing.  Bet on it though, if you pressed him, and he came up with a better thing, a new police cruiser, say, a year later, when the town goes to buy that cruiser, if not him then a dozen like him will be shouting about how the town can't afford it, and there are better things to fund.

A new park maybe.

It's not the money.

Show him how the town's not going to have to pay the whole cost.  Point out to him how much having a park on the waterfront will improve the quality of life for the whole town, how it will attract people to living there, how it new businesses will want to move in.  Over time the town will make back all the money and then some.  They won't believe you and wouldn't care even if they did.

It's that money being spent now that matters to them.

Again, to be fair, once the town's bought the land it'll have to pay to turn it into a park.  There are probably more grants that it can get for that, but then it will have to be maintained.  The 40 thousand to buy the land is not the whole cost of the park.

But for some of these people it's not just the cost of the park that's bothering them.  It's the money that's not going to be made.

One point eight acres of Hudson River waterfont is a goldmine for some developer.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  To some people money that could be made but somehow does not get made is money lost.  They feel it go right out of their bank accounts.

Even if there was no way they were going to be in on the killing themselves, they feel cheated, robbed of what's rightfully theirs.

There are people who will never get rich, never make a dime off a real estate deal or a big business investment or a new stock, who would rather see a millionaire they don't know make another million than watch their own kids playing on a new set of swings or their neighbors launching a canoe from the new town landing.

Swindlers of all kinds love these people.

Political swindlers prey on their penny wise pound foolishness to get themselves elected as tax cutters and budget balancers and great bringers-in of new businesses that will put everybody to work, make everbody rich, lower everybody's taxes by increasing the tax base manyfold, and then once in office are free to loot the treasury and hand everything that is not nailed down over to their swindling private business type friends and cronies.

Real estate swindlers, stock swindlers, big business swindlers can use them as fronts, stand them up as shields between them and honest government types who would get in the way of their swindles.  "Look," the swindlers can say, "The people are the ones who want this big box store!  The people are the ones who don't want a park where I plan to put up a row of luxury condos!"

"Let the people decide!"

And if enough people are foolish enough to give the swindlers what they want, later on, after the swindlers have laughed their way to the bank or, as happens a lot more often, after they've been hauled off to jail or to court, and it's time to clean up the mess they left behind, the cheapskates will turn out again to yelp and whine and holler about the cost.

It won't be about the money, understand.

It'll be the principle.

Comments

[Michael Bains]

Exactly why ball players have to go to the highest bidder, despite being given their chance when they struggled through their early years: it's the principal of the thing.

(And we don't need to love the cheapskate owner's - with their municipally built and funded stadiums - to see the reality of that one either.)

[DuWayne]

I just went the rounds on anti-taxing with my pastor. We were actually discussing health care (I'm a single payer supporter) and all he can see is the taxes. We then continued on the vein of taxes and while he doesn't want to see a decrease in services he does want to see eponentialy lower taxes. The assumption a lot of anti-tax people is that somehow welfare is sucking up all our tax dollars and if we just cut it off we would have a lower tax burden. No matter what proof you might show a person like him that it could easily cost us more to eliminate it they get stuck on those welfare dollars and refuse to see any cost analysis comparisons.

[sfmike]

Great rant(s), Lance.

Jim Bouton, the former major league knuckleball pitcher and author of the late 1960s inside-baseball diary classic "Ball Four" has just published a book that goes straight to the heart of what you write. It's called "Foul Ball" and is the story of a 19th century minor league baseball park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in the Berkshires that Bouton and a group of friends tried to save from a group of local politicos who were trying to tear it down and put up a new, taxpayer-financed stadium. The small-town power brokers and their pennywise, poundfoolish supporters are such outrageously crooked, venal characters that they are quite entertaining in a horrible way, and the fact that General Electric (and its toxic PCBs)is the shadowy money/power behind the scenes only makes the story more fascinating.

I haven't gotten to the end of the book yet, but I believe that one of the appendices indicates that most of the bad guys have ended up in prison. Do check it out.

[Linkmeister]

sfmike, he was on the old Moyers-run "Now" program in Nov. 2003. I wrote a post about that appearance.

[Kevin Wolf]

Great couple of posts, Lance.

Yeah, it drives me crazy when I get into one of these conversations. I'm sorry to say most of my family members are of a conservative bent and tend to think they pay too much in taxes and that every dollar spent is a waste and that the entire system is rigged to hurt them. These are folks who make much, much more money than I do.

We've somehow lost the ability to see the benefits of group projects and of sharing the cost of needed services.

Worse, I can get no meaningful answer when I bring up the profligate ways of our current federal government, which is spending money all over the place, entirely on "projects" that benefit only a few.

[grasshopper]

Another great fear for suburbanites re: making the most of their natural surroundings, such as, let's say, a giant field of land along the Hudson River, where one might watch children building arm strength and friendships by swinging from hand ring to hand ring is--and I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't experienced it--xenophobia.
We lived within a certain school district but outside the "town limits" of a place along the Hudson with a beautiful, sprawling park at the river's edge. Iron gates and police on duty prevented anyone who lived outside arcane and shifting-with-who-you-were boundaries from entering the park, which showed movies on summer nights, hosted fire works, and served as a preferred class trip for the elementary school when the children studied riverlife. (School children who attended the public schools were written into a special exemption code.) The cut-off age, however, was fourteen, causing annual consternation when the high school's best all-round baseball player lived within the unwelcome fringes.
The mayor then would relax inspections for twenty-four hours. Word would go out: the Shaney family (fictitious name)is being honored at a baseball barbeque: No one's carding tonight.
Routinely I asked not just the guard on duty but all the town's bigwigs why I was not allowed inside the park gates UNLESS it was to "help out" at a first grade outing, for which the teacher had asked me to bring the drinks, paper cups, sandwiches, brownies, apple slices, and carrot and celery sticks? And routinely this is the answer I was given:
"You know, lady, we can't let just anybody in! Do you want to see people taking the train here from the Bronx?!"
My children then watched me lose my thin grasp on civil control more than once. The "train from the Bronx" I explained to my son and daughter were fighting words.
Soon my children were warning the sports coaches and town police: Please, don't get into it with her. She's nuts.
While the park did provide a very pleasant spot for those paying a special, living-within-park-range-tax, it also welcomed swarms of very nasty geese. Often the beautiful grass wore a carpet of guano.
About the time we moved, the little town did build another, bigger park along the river, supposedly open to all comers. And, it was spectacular: Basketball courts, meticulously maintained baseball fields, everything but shade, which the old park owned in its entirety, thanks to ancient, cloud-cradling oak trees.
From late November to mid-February, I sneaked into that forbidden park, which was blustery and freezing cold. I'd swing on the iced-over swings. I'd rollerblade along the frozen winding path. And I had tons of fun all by my lone self. For I would not be denied my slippery cold satisfaction--even if I was never caught.