Bill Tallen

I read a lot of science fiction growing up, including a novel from 1966 with this title, about which I remember only the image behind the acronym: We’re in a car speeding down a grassy slope toward an approaching cliff edge, and the “fluid’s running out of my brakes.”  Which some mornings, on my first pass through the news, seems like a fitting metaphor for our state, our nation and the world. At such times, dogs and cats living together, and the yellow aspen leaves riding the autumn wind, are welcome diversions. As is strong coffee. But normalcy bias does not serve us well. There is a cliff out there.

We’re seven days out from the midterm election. Wyoming politics and the world at large are in turmoil, and no October Surprise has been sprung on us; but a few things stand out. Or spring up again, and tug at my sleeve on successive days, begging attention. Here’s one. 

Proposition 1, the 50% reduction in property tax on primary residences, has establishment politicians and bureaucrats crying bloody murder. All of our essential services will be gutted, they say; you will die freezing in the ditch off an unplowed highway or will burn in your lightly taxed home because law enforcement, fire, and emergency response will be crippled. Spare me, you fear-mongering gluttons of taxpayer wealth.  

In my years in federal civil service, we spent a lot of time at least every other year addressing the looming possibility of major cuts in our agency budget. Few of them occurred, but as Eisenhower memorably said on the eve of D-Day, “Plans are worthless; but planning is everything.” Planning prepared us for the pain — and gave us lessons in human behavior.

I never knew managers of seven or eight-figure budgets who didn’t fight furiously (breaking actual pencil leads, if you can believe that) to keep every dollar of last year’s budget by predicting the end of the world as we knew it, if spending were reduced. Unless of course, the reduction was taken in somebody else’s budget. They were all furious and convincing in debate, and only those at the back of the pack ever suffered much of a reduction, in the end. 

It was commonplace to approach the end of every fiscal year in a frenzy of last-minute spending, zeroing out the account to avoid giving the impression that operations could have continued without having spent every appropriated penny of the taxpayers’ money. Higher-ups might look at a failure to spend every allocated dollar as evidence that all those funds were never really required in the first place. They might even reduce your next budget by that much. Although this seldom actually happened, why risk it? Spend it all, just to preserve the status quo. Fight bravely for your staff and your missions, and to hell with all others, and with fiscal sanity. Tax and borrow to meet every inflated need.

Few are brave enough to publicly deny that there is significant waste in the government’s management of our money, but fewer still admit to any waste in their department. Too many, however,  seem to believe that government’s wild deficit spending — or in Wyoming, the steady double-digit growth in reserves and ‘rainy day’ funds — can continue forever. They’re wrong. If a thing cannot go on forever — it won’t.

If the moral and psychological dimension of this sick institutional devotion to steadily increasing taxation is not enough, consider this. Whether it’s in home and family budgets, or running a small business, when we face a decrease in income, we simply adjust. What gets cut first? Luxuries and wants, not necessities. It’s an insult to voters’ intelligence to suggest the county’s or the state’s spending on essential services would be the first things to be cut by a decrease in residential property tax revenue. Elected and nonelected officials would sit down to do difficult but necessary triage when needs and wants together exceed resources. Or so we must trust. 

In a state like Wyoming, awash in reserves, there is enough to meet our needs, even if traditional spending models must be reconsidered. Is that not the work we elect leaders to do? There is much waste to trim, and many luxuries we can do without to ensure that true needs are met.  

The actual reduction in assessed value on primary residences that Proposition 1 will bring is not apocalyptic. While it will differ across counties, the best analyses I’ve seen suggest the cuts in revenue will be below 10%, because the land those homes sit on, and other classes of real property, will be unaffected. And finally, the proposition calls for review and adjustment in two years time. We won’t go over the cliff in two years, even if all the doom-crying is close to correct — which it is not.

We have to find the courage to reduce spending, at all levels of government, and it appears that the only way voters and taxpayers can directly influence that is by withholding a fraction of our wealth. This is a good place to start.