The caption above my letter (Forum, Nov. 10), provided gratis, and gratuitously, by TGI is inaccurate. I did not say that increasing taxes is not the way to better roads. I said increasing the tax base won’t do it; it
The caption above my letter (Forum, Nov. 10), provided gratis, and
gratuitously, by TGI is inaccurate. I did not say that increasing taxes is not
the way to better roads. I said increasing the tax base won’t do it; it makes
things worse.
In my effort to be brief and to the point, I failed to make
clear the difference between a tax increase and an increase in the tax base. At
least, it would seem so from the caption which the TGI caption-writer
wrote.
A tax increase means you pay more taxes for the same property than
you did before.
An increase in the tax base means more people paying taxes;
a population increase.
The whole point I was trying to make is that
increasing the tax base does not increase the money available to fix roads or
anything else because more people use more services, in excess of what they
pay. The numbers presented in Rita De Silva’s article bore this out, as I
showed. More people using the roads means they have to be repaired more
often.
Expensive property is acquired by wealthy people, who expect good
roads and all the other services to be provided in return for those big taxes.
The only way to do this is by increasing the tax rate, which applies to all
taxpayers, wealthy or not. I have seen many long-time residents taxed out of
their homes.
The only reason I am bothering to nag about this is that
developers tell us that increasing the tax base will help provide more services
for the rest of us. What it does provide is more government jobs because there
is more to administrate. The developers get away with this as long as we let
them.
From Arnold Nurock, Kilauea
