Bill Filing Opens In Jefferson City Tomorrow
Inside the front cover of the November 27th New York Times Magazine, please find the ad titled Above Extraordinary for ONE 57, new residences in the Park Hyatt New York.
For $19,700,000 unit 46C offers four bedrooms and baths, a powder room and a Grand Salon that’s almost 900 square feet by itself. And, in small type, the ad notes “TAX ABATEMENT IN EFFECT.”
Yes, a family moving up from a mere $10,000,000 tenement to “a deluxe apartment in the sky” gets a special tax break.
Welcome to the New Order.
Here in Missouri pre-filing of bills for the 2017 legislative session begins tomorrow. It will not be a good day for most Missourians. Among the items known to be on the super-majority party’s agenda…
► Right To Work
► Curtailing Prevailing Wage
► Discrimination Protection for Employers
► Fewer Weeks Of Unemployment Pay (& less eligibility)
► Restrictions On Malpractice & Other Lawsuits
► School Vouchers
► Speed-up Of The Schmidt Tax Cuts
► More Targeted Tax Cuts
► Privatization Of MO HealthNet (Medicaid)
Rumored to be in the wings are a raid on the main teacher pension plan, additional restrictions on municipal governments’ ability to enact local ordinances, the end of Missouri’s minimum wage, and – I hope this is a joke – lowering the age for concealed carry from 19 to 18 and allowing guns in schools. (Which will, of course, result in no high school senior ever getting a failing grade.)
Remember Dynasty, that 1980’s worship of rich people? We are now moving to government devoted to making rich people richer, where big hair and shoulder pads grant an entitlement.
Speaking of entitlements, well, the last time the Republicans had the governorship and the legislature they gutted Medicaid and began the cancerous re-organization of the Department Of Social Services still slithering forward today. Next year I suspect they’ll set their sights ‘lower.’
You see, caring for the less fortunate and ending hunger are no longer majority party values. The days when Governor John Ashcroft defended opposition to free school breakfast programs on moral grounds (breakfast should be a dedicated family time) have given way to “taxpayer protection” – the notion that state government ought to be made as small and poor as possible. The less government does the better.
If you need help you must not be a good person.
Of course, the majority of Missourians voted for the New Order (whether they realized it or not).
What to do?
Step One: Shine bright lights on the bad ideas from Jefferson City as they occur.
Step Two: Do what we can for the newly injured and the more than a million struggling Missourians.
Prepare to get busy.
Submitted by Glenn Koenen
The tax abatement for ONE 57 is simply disgusting. There is no other way to describe it. I completely agree with your “What to do” list. But one thing that troubles me is the ongoing willingness of those at the middle and bottom of the economic spectrum to vote so willingly against their own interests. No amount of reason or logic or truth seems to make a dent. They keep getting gulled by emotion and anger and by irrational pie-in-the-sky messages. How can we break this cycle? Perhaps progressives have to stop using logic and reason and tap into and feed the emotion and anger within these voters. Maybe one day we will have literacy and education rates that produce informed voters who can respond to rational appeals, but we aren’t there yet and it is nowhere in sight.