Peachtree City and other Fayette County voters are being led as if by a Judas goat to the slaughter that is the TSPLOST: the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.
In the first place, the name itself is a lie. It’s not a local option: it’s something cooked up by politicians and consultants in Atlanta who think they know better than we how to spend our money. Only a politician could define “local” as encompassing the entire Atlanta metro area, and include Fayette County in that traffic-mass-transit-cesspool.
In the second place, the notion that this tax would last for only 10 years is a lie. The biggest projects in the approved list are for transit programs — bus, rail—that will require eternal subsidies.
The solution to the Ga. Highway 74-Interstate 85 intersection is billed as “anticipating federal funds.” That’s another lie. They aren’t federal funds, they are our tax dollars, taken from us and doled out by bureaucrats and politicians, after they’ve taken their processing fee. Yes, it’s free: we just have to pay postage and handling. Just like the television hucksters say.
Continuing with the words of a thousand television hucksters, “But wait! There’s more!” The approved TSPLOST project list is a collection of what, charitably, could be called stupid; less charitably, criminal.
Take for instance the doggie treat thrown at Peachtree City: the McDuff Parkway extension. This project will merely move the current traffic jams down the road a mile or so. I watched the same thing happen to U.S. Highway 1 through Arlington, Va., during the years I was stationed at the Pentagon. The Department of Transportation would widen the road for a mile or so, and the traffic jam would simply move south to the next stoplight.
Some of these projects are talked about as “capital improvement” projects. That’s another lie. Capital is spent to create wealth and to create things that, themselves, create wealth. The only wealth to be created by these projects is the money going into the hands of consultants, and money going into the patronage slush funds of the politicians who will oversee these projects.
Any additional sales taxes will cut sales; they will hurt merchants and their employees; they will hurt you and me when we go to the store. How many more vacant storefronts, how many more closed restaurants to we want to see?
Instead of adding sales tax, we should demand our representatives in state and county government lower sales taxes to stimulate the real economy, not the fake economy of the so-called public sector. (The notion of a “public sector” is another lie, but one that will have to be treated in another letter.)
We must take back our government.
Paul Lentz
Peachtree City, Ga.
