Time and Time Again

0

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the “Forever Stamp.” Once bought, it can be used for first-class postage regardless of future rate increases. Not a bad concept, actually. You don’t ever have to worry about buying those pesky one or two cent stamps.

While the concept of the Forever Stamp is one of the few good things to come out of the Postal Service in recent years, the idea of something lasting forever is a singularly bad idea when it comes to new taxes. Just three-and-a-half years after the public narrowly passed Measure R, which increased the sales tax in Los Angeles County to fund transportation improvements within the county, they’re baaaaack.

This time they want to continue this regressive tax quite literally forever because the Feds won’t lend them money. Essentially, they want to be able to spend money from the tax extension now, borrowing against future tax revenues decades into the future.

While investment in infrastructure and development of sensible mass transit is good public policy, the same can’t be said about spending money we don’t have on ill-defined schemes with no specificity, no accountability, no metrics, no performance criteria and no adequate oversight. Essentially, they are asking us to turn on the faucet forever and to issue a “Forever Blank Check,” despite the fact that government agencies such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted with blank checks.

Some of the specious arguments used to try to “rationalize” the conversion of the temporary Measure R tax into a “Forever Tax” are that construction costs can be locked in at today’s dollars, which can be paid off with tomorrow’s inflationary dollars, and that the borrowed money spent on construction jobs today can somehow kick-start the still moribund economy.

These arguments are bogus. The first one doesn’t take into account the significantly higher interest costs involved: We’ll be paying back the money borrowed up front for decades and significant chunks of future taxpayer dollars will go to debt service rather than actual investment. We’ll also lose flexibility and be stuck paying off today’s equipment and technology that could be outdated – or even obsolete – decades after we’re still footing the bill. Even if we could create some jobs now by a spending spree, rather than burdening future generations more than we already have, it’s time to start trying to live within our means.

Kafkaesque bureaucracy

What makes the Forever Tax even worse is that we would mortgage our children’s future to the hilt in order to funnel even more money into Metro. As a local official whose city has had frequent dealings with the agency over the past few years, I have experienced up close how Metro is exactly the kind of Kafkaesque bureaucracy that seems to be the governmental version of the banks that were “too big to fail.” It’s an organization that is intoxicated with its own power, has been repeatedly chastised for civil rights violations and spends like a drunken sailor on sexy new projects while neglecting maintenance on core services. No wonder it was recently described in the Los Angeles Times as “a poorly run transit agency.”

Short of being dismantled and replaced with a more transparent, efficient and democratic successor agency, what Metro needs is a major governance overhaul and a rational system of checks and balances to stop it from running amok. The last thing it needs is more blank-check taxpayer funding.

The Forever Tax will likely be one of multiple tax initiatives on this November’s ballot. Even in this economy, the politicos’ solution is to raise and extend taxes rather than make necessary systemic changes by dealing with such important issues as pension reform. Guess they feel that with the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case that loosened special interest funding, they’ll get enough special interest moola to be able to sell anything to anybody.

In reality, though this Forever Tax seems like nothing more than an ego play by powerful local politicians who like to play with choo-choos. Ironically, they seem not only to have forgotten the core values of local democracy, but also the core values of a sensible, effective mass transit system. As sexy as choo-choos are, great mass transit is a combination of various modes of transportation, including light rail and bus service. While Metro has spent more on heavy-rail subways, it has drastically cut back on bus service, sometimes affecting the most downtrodden in society.

A new Forever Tax is a bad idea, particularly in this economy. Bad ideas sometimes die hard, but according to the title of the book upon which “Die Hard” is based, “nothing lasts forever.” Except, it seems, governmental waste, lack of accountability and insider politics.

Though special interests may try to convince us with Citizens United campaigns otherwise, blank checks in this or any economy are not the answer. We need to reject this ego-driven, shortsighted measure and to vigorously oppose the transformation of what was only meant to be a temporary tax into a Forever Tax.

Because forever is a long, long time.

John Mirisch is vice mayor of the city of Beverly Hills.

No posts to display