Archive: Opinions

EditorialI am having a post-mid-life crisis.  I have been second guessing key turning points in my life that led me to start a new business in my mid-50s rather than staying in my original career from which I could be retiring around now with something resembling security.

I also think that Murphy lives in my basement.  You know Murphy's law: 'Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.'  In my case its an economy apparently out of control at a time when I can ill afford it.  As a result I've had to rethink the idea of money and how much of it I can spend.  I'm not really complaining, because I know I'm in the same boat with a lot of other people, and I have it a lot better than most of the people in the world.

But I do expect my governments to take the same care when spending the money they demand from me every year, and to keep taxes as low as possible.  To think about what they need, not what they want.  To be prudent, fiscally responsible.  Because the money I can't afford to pay in taxes needs to be as little as possible right now.

Earmarks have always been something of a joke in the same way the Darwin Awards are.  It is fun to laugh at $4 million to study whether whales actually smile.  Or to poke fun at someone who was so stupid that he killed himself trying some harebrained scheme.  But the Darwin Awards leave me feeling hollow -- after all this is real people's lives we're talking about, cut short.  Not really funny, despite the ironic circumstances of their deaths.

Those earmarks affect real peoples' lives, too.  Certainly they help the people that get them, but they steal money from the rest of us for things we don't need.  They represent what we want, not what we need.  That is why I reluctantly support the Lansing Town Board's decision to take the lower bid for Dog Control this week.  While I love the SPCA and want to support it, I applaud the Board's fiscally responsible route.

After interviewing several board members, the owner of Country Acres, and the Executive Director of the SPCA, I am convinced that the board performed due diligence before choosing Country Acres.  I think they  looked beyond rumors, false information, and even some true information to get a fairly objective picture of what they would be buying into if they left the SPCA.  And despite many board members wishing they could choose the SPCA I applaud their choosing what we need over what we want.

It has been said over the past couple of months that if everyone's' pet projects (no pun intended) added a few dollars to our taxes, the new expenditures would add up to serious money.

I know that is true.  In my own household we have long struggled with the concept of 'just this one small purchase' being insignificant until our credit card bill comes and shows us the cumulative damage of all those small purchases.  The Board did a good thing looking at that big picture before the bill comes.

If I had stayed on that original career path and ended up with the kind of security that I hoped I would have by now I don't know if I would be writing this.  But I hope I would.  Because I really like our local SPCA and think they do a great job of just about everything they do, but I hope I would still see the big picture, though, because in difficult times people are likely to have it much harder than you do.

The bottom line is that taxes are the one piece of your expenditures that you can't control, no matter how fiscally responsible you are, and no matter how much or little you have.  So we have to rely on our legislators to be responsible for us.  There are all too few who take that responsibility seriously.  I think we are lucky that our town representatives do.

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