Niagara Falls prime example of ‘Culture of Waste’
By Frank Parlato
For a poor city, a great deal of money flows through Niagara Falls government pipelines to select people.
While taxes are high.
There are those, of course, who never see the connection between government spending and how government gets its money.
When government spends, people don’t think, “Hey, they are spending my money.” They think, “Hey, great, government is doing this!”
Few understand the principle: Government takes its money from the people by force. They do not ask. They confiscate. If you do not pay property taxes in this city, for example, in three years or so your home is sold and you are removed from it.
We have, for the last few weeks, been writing about the waste, the favoritism, and the use of public money that produces few results. For a poor city, a lot of money flows through here.
Meantime, Niagara Falls is about the highest taxed city in America in proportion to its assets.
This week we will examine another boondoggle of waste - the bed tax money. The $1.7 million or so yearly – gone with the wind.
Of course, $1.7 million may not seem like much, but it is significant as an example of the Santa Claus culture.
A culture that taxes high, sees a cadre of bureaucrats living high on the governmental hog and dole out to the few. These, along with their fellow hogs, are the most vocal about how good they are doing, while the silent work and pay and, when they can, they flee the city. Not for nothing has the population of Niagara Falls made its rapid decline.
Spreading money to get a few votes, of course, will make some happy and most will not connect the dots or understand how little is done for all that public spending.
Part of the problem is the press, itself. Throughout America, the press reports any government project in near joyous language, without reckoning the waste or cost in people’s struggles. They fail to take into account the quiet men and women living in their quiet homes, leaving every morning to brave tough work in order to support their own, while depriving themselves in order to pay ever-increasing taxes, only for it to get into the hands of bureaucrats with fancy, press-friendly plans. Announced is some social engineering, or entitlement, or corporate enriching war. The same working schmuck who pays, does not realize why he never has enough. Or why the country is going broke.
The dots are never connected between the long-suffering worker and the happy plan of a Hard Rock Concert or a Holiday Market or to pay a student to live here, paid by someone here or in Utah or Texas - someone pays. If a direct line between dots were only made, it would reveal some man or woman worked years to pay for one of these schemes and long after the project is done, the headline forgotten.
This is our national disease: We do not connect dots between taxpayer and government. We fail to realize how much more the people would have if we could cure ourselves of the belief that government must do for us. If we could be patient and wait for supply and demand and freedom to work its magic as it did during most of our country’s history.
If you get a grant, a gift, a benefit, a slice of welfare, corporate or personal, and you did not work for it - you took from workers without working. But someone worked hard without getting. On the other hand – and this never makes good press: A dollar of tax relief is a full dollar in the peoples’ pockets.
A dollar taxed to give to some government spending program, although it may make good press, is not a dollar gained. It is perhaps 33 cents of bureaucracy and 67 cents of spread.
Besides the great truth that those who do not work should not receive and that government uses force, which changes the culture of freedom in our land – the more government, the less freedom - there is the economic stupidity of it. If you lose 33 percent in bureaucracy costs, with three transactions you’ve lost the dollar. That is why the nation and this city are going broke.
Because the people think government is spending its own money.