The City of Asheville hosted another public meeting on the budget. Had I been reading the newspapers at work, I would have known the format was going to be different from that of the last meeting. A stated objective of the meeting was to educate us iggy masses into believing government has no magic money tree, no perpetual motion machine, no powers of spontaneous generation, and no portals to endless new frontiers – only tradeoffs. As it turned out, either forty or over fifty people showed up to select their favorite proposed budget balancers from a menu prepared by city staff.
Reporters are saying (1, 2, 3) the number-one choice was a 2% tax hike. Construction of a demographic profile of the participants is left to the reader. For all I know, every single one was a purely objective budget strategist specializing in public policy. Nobody would be so evil as to round up six or seven friends to lobby for a special interest. Nah. At least we may assume the menu did not ask participants to begin by picking one of two entrees: a 2% tax hike or else; because some groups wanted a 4% tax increase and one wanted to go even higher.
Rather ill with enough visioning number-two, I had chosen to attend an “important” business meeting instead. The media make it sound like I missed an opportunity to be heard, but I console myself with the more realistic scenario that my comments would have been treated like a little baby mess. Whatever wasn’t watered-down by a moderator unacquainted with terms from the fiscal conservative lexicon, would have been politically-corrected in the spin cycle and rinsed out in the democratic process.
