What if you only paid for fire, police, and road maintenance in your property taxes and everything else had a crowd funding page? Americans would have vastly more financial freedom.
Financial freedom also means being able to educate your children the way you see fit.
Homeschooling is a full time job that takes time and financial resources to be successful. Taking children to extracurricular activities, managing their education and meeting up with friends for socialization all take time, which is why it can be challenging to homeschool in a dual income household. However, due to the high cost of living, depending upon a single income to accommodate homeschooling can also be difficult.
One of the reasons the cost of living is so high is due to the high budgets of local tax funded, government services. Government spending inherently causes inflation, which raises the cost of everything, whether a federal, state, or local level.
It seems like every election cycle there multiple ballot questions, such as "Do you want to build (...) or provide new service (...)? It will only add ($$$) to your current (property, income, or sales tax)." Voters will usually say "yes" to these initiatives, completely ignoring the economic challenges that these spending bills impose upon everyone. And although any specific spending bill may seem like a small amount, they have terrible long-term consequences. That is, 1) they usually never go away, where the increase is usually doesn't expire, 2) the benefit of the project or service is always exaggerated, 3) the amount of spending is always under-represented, so that these programs must draw from general funding, and 4) the spending is usually never "Ear-marked" (dedicated) towards the specific project.
We implore you to consider the costs related to the next tax funded ballot initiatives, whatever they may be. You and your neighbors need your tax dollars instead of building that new town pool or community center they probably won't even use, and you are a far better judge of spending your own money, rather than a beauracrat or politician.
Below are some local budgets we should consider decreasing to lower the cost of living.
The Public School System
Public school supporters have "painted themselves into a corner". After decades of unchecked and bloated school budget increases, families are currently struggling to pull their children from a failing public school system due to the (oxymorionic) high costs of "free" public education. That is, pouring more money into a failing system is keeping communities poor by requiring them to dump ever-increasing amounts of money into the very system that is keeping them poor. The financial burden of education for normal, working class families is significant and vastly increases the cost of living for everyone. And sending your child to a private school doesn't fix this problem, since those expenditures are simply added onto the high cost of public education.
"K-12 schools spend about $612.7 billion annually. This is about $12,612 per pupil." Click to see how much your state pays per pupal per year https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state
The public school budgets are objectively excessive. The truth is, with all the federal funding, state funding, local taxes, grants and fundraisers, I don't think anyone really knows how much we spend on public school. They are "blank checks".
The school system has continued to demonstrate they are not good stewards of our tax dollars. Stop voting to give them more money. Despite the high budgets, schools continuously complain about budget issues and low salaries. How much money is enough? And even when they are funded, schools continue to have terrible conditions like mold, leaky roofs, roaches and a lack of heat or air conditioning in classrooms. The public school system has a stewardship (management) problem, not a budget problem.
We need to stop this machine. Public schools are making news daily for their broken system. Schools are inflating grades and passing failing students, Students are not meeting literacy and math standards and predator teachers are making news daily for their crimes against children. Despite Trumps executive order, boys continue to dominate women's sports in public schools across America and include DEI programs in their districts.
It is very against "school choice" (education freedom) to continue to vote to give "blank checks" to a known broken system set up to fail and force non public schoolers to foot the bill.
Click here for more information about schools being a bad investment to tax payers.
The Library
The Library is a large financial burden for tax payers to maintain and staff, and you have no say in what the library actually does with your money. You are also funding wicked programs like "Drag queen story time".
There are plenty of better, more economic ways to access inexpensive books. People give books away on the "Buy nothing" facebook pages. Kindle Unlimited is very affordable. Used books are available everywhere; at thrift stores, Ebay, Amazon, FB marketplace, and in used books stores. You can even get free books at "Little free libraries" that are set up around towns. And have you heard about this new (sic) thing called the "Internet", which provides free access to millions of educational resources?
The Senior Center
Saying that we should decrease funding on services like this probably makes us sound heartless, but its quite the opposite. We are sympathetic to people who are not able to afford the tax increase to fund these programs and ones like it.
A local town had "Remodeling the Senior Center" on the ballot. Six months later, it was voted down again after they put it on the ballot for a second time.
Senior cener supporters were openly upset it was voted down. However, it was large financial burden on tax-payers and many paying town residents would not be able to actually use the center. There are many public and private services already available for seniors.
The current climate of increasing taxes for so many programs, including this one is not sustainable and is increasing the cost of living. If some seniors want to get together on a regular basis, they should form a club, instead of making everyone pay for their entertainment center.
Parks and playgrounds
We have many of them around our town and they are very expensive to maintain. In my area, local towns too often have a ballot initiate to replace perfectly good playgrounds with a brand new, state of the art set of equipment (Because its "For the children"). This is a waste of taxpayer dollars to replace playgrounds so often.
School Choice Voucher Laws
Recently, school choice has become popular, and with that, so have school choice voucher programs. These programs are not helpful to our communities for many reasons and they cost huge amounts of money.
We already have school choice (education freedom) in every state. You can choose to send your children to a public school, a private school, or you can homeschool. The right to homeschool your children (in some form) is guaranteed as part of the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution and the Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that you, as a parent, have the right to teach your own children. School choice voucher laws are Big government bureaucracy disguised as "help".
We don't have to guess what would happen if voucher laws pass because the states that have passed them are experiencing problems first hand. Do not let these terrible laws happen to your state.
School choice voucher programs are terrible for our communities for a variety of reasons. One being that vouchers are very expensive for tax payers.
It costs Arizona $332M to pay for vouchers subsidizing private school tuition, homeschooling: See link.
Voucher costs are out of control - it is costing states a lot of money: See link.
“During the 2024 - 2025 school year, the West Virginia voucher program is expected to funnel $21.6 million away from the state’s public schools–enough to pay the salaries for 301 professional teachers and 63 school service workers. As a result of the voucher and other declines in enrollment, multiple school districts are already warning residents that they need to impose property tax increases in order to continue to pay current teachers’ salaries.” See link.
for more information about how vouchers harm our community, click here.
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