by John McClaughry A large insurance company has been flooding the television channels with an advertising slogan “Only Pay for What You Need”. It’s an interesting exercise to apply that idea to various public spending issues. Typically, at the state level, our elected legislature decides how the tax dollars they collect from Vermonters are to be spent – supporting schools, maintaining highways, implementing public health measures, subsidizing favored energy producers, paying for law enforcement, and so on. Once the spending bills are enacted into law, all taxpayers are obliged to pay the taxes to cover the spending, whether or not they approve of the spending. The majority rules. This is also true at the town level, but here the citizen taxpayers themselves, not their elected representatives, decide how their property tax dollars will be spent. (The noncitizen and nonresident taxpayers, of course, don’t get to vote.) Most towns have on their town meeting warnings separate requests for contributions. In my town, these include everything from museum admission to ambulance service to youth baseball to transit buses. Town meeting voters decide item by item: yes, if so how much, or no. At our last meeting, all ten requests were approved. […]
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