Politics and Dharma

Attention Texans. You’re having an election. This is the very least you can do to participate in your government: please vote.

For most of you, this election is entirely composed of “bond issues”. While this isn’t as flashy or emotionally addictive as some campaign for Important Office, it is still important that you take time to vote. Think about what a “bond issue” is: it’s a request made by the state legislature to the people of the state asking to borrow some enormous amount of money. We’re told how much money will be borrowed and about how it will be spent. When you vote “yes” on a bond issue, you are obligating yourself to pay the bond debt through extended taxes. When you don’t vote on a bond issue that passes, you’ve allowed yourself to be obligated to pay extended taxes on services, infrastructure, and support without even the minimal level of oversight an election provides.

When a majority vote “no” on a bond issue, the legislature is forced to come up with another way to fund whatever they’re trying to do, which is usually extending taxes. But when we pay for services and infrastructure costs through the normal tax base and not by way of expensive bond packages, more of our money goes to getting things done instead of lining bankers’ pockets.

This said, I would like to further recommend that when you vote, you vote “No” for all bonds. I’m not being parsimonious: I would like to see the agencies listed in these bond issues get the kind of funding they need. This funding should come from the state legislature raising the appropriate types and levels of taxes. When we borrow money, we lose some of our purchasing power, and a good deal of our bargaining power — all so congress critters can claim to have done “all they can” to lower taxes.There are things I expect the state to do: it has obligations that need to be appropriately funded, so I’m not opposed to new or higher taxes to get things done.

My “poster child” issue is proposition #4. All of those things I expect the state to do is in this proposition, only I had expected that the state would have appropriately budgeted for these things long before now. Why do we need to borrow money to pay for parks and cops and health services? So that no one will complain about how the bulk of the money goes to building new jails? We don’t need new jails, we need to stop incarcerating for non-violent drug crimes and institute state-level regulation on street drugs to get the bootleggers profits out of the hands of the gangs and the drug cartels. Why are we borrowing money to pay for health services and cops? Didn’t we know we’d be needing to pay these bills? There’s nothing about this bond issue that’s good, and it’s just one of 16 we face here in Travis County.

Go vote right now. Early voting ends Nov 2. Voting Day Nov 6.