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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Spotted Owls Revenge Denied |
| 2007-06-02 |
| This is taken from a discussion group where a bunch of librarians are discussing why Voters in Jackson County, Oregon, decisively rejected a property tax levy May 15 that would have reopened the countyÂ’s library system. Note that this is the county where Clinton banned logging to protect the spotted owl! In trying to explain this problem they totally ignore the fact that since all those loggers lost their jobs, nobody has the money for a library, Enjoy, btw... a librarian friend clued me into this story By now I trust that most of you have seen the item from American Libraries Online about the failure of the levy in Jackson County, Oregon, that would have raised enough money for the county's 15 libraries to reopen and continue operating. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here: Levy Fails This is a closure of a significant public library -- Jackson County, in southwestern Oregon, has a population of 181,000, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. The margin of defeat was also significant -- 58 percent against vs. only 42 percent for. The county's personal income data, again according to the 2000 census, is as follows: Median household income was $36,461 and per capita income was $19,498, with 8.9 percent of families and 12.5 percent of the population below the poverty line, including 16.3 percent of those under age 18 and 6.9 percent of those age 65 or over. The anonymous authors of the Wikipedia entry for Jackson County strongly imply that it is a hotbed of racism, narrow thinking, and antigovernmentism. Perhaps some Publibbers with personal experience in Oregon can comment on the accuracy of such perceptions. In fairness to the residents of Jackson County -- and as one who has only followed this crisis from afar -- I would acknowledge that the county doubtlessly is strapped for money and the local population is not particularly well off as a whole (as the above figures may suggest). And whenever government operating funds are tight, you know who gets cut first. I doubt that I will soon again see something quite as dismal as the Jackson County Library System's index page: http://www.jcls.org/ One could argue that the failure to support this library is the product of local circumstances -- the county's loss of a federal subsidy to offset lost revenues from taxes on now-banned timber cutting -- but I wonder if the Jackson County closure is a harbinger of things to come. Here's why. I have recently read that the central banks of various Asian nations hold about a trillion (yes, trillion) dollars in United States government bonds, and purchase more of them every year. This is how we finance our adventures overseas as well as the more humdrum, daily operations of the federal government -- since we spend more than we collect through income taxes, we make up the difference by selling Treasury bonds to foreign bankers. We neither cut back on expenditures to bring them into alignment with revenues, nor do we increase revenues by raising the federal income tax. This staggering, and growing, debt will have to be serviced, and that means that in the future more of our taxes will have to go to paying off the bonds, and less will be available to patch holes in the interstates, bolster failing social safety net programs, launch space probes, and so on. The predictable response from the federal government will not be to raise revenues -- which means raising taxes, which has become the latest third rail of American politics -- or to cut popular programs (a fourth rail, if you will), but to go even deeper into debt. That course, unfortunately, is unsustainable. Our Asian creditors will have a say in just how much more of our spending they are willing to finance. (They will ultimately have considerable leverage over what we do with our economy.) A solution will be to pass the responsibility for many services to local government. Unfortunately, this will come at a time when the core of the local tax base -- the beleaguered middle class -- will see stagnant or falling household incomes. They will not support new tax levies, as we are already seeing, and something will have to give. And you and I know that what will have to give is not going to be public-safety services. How deep and extensive the retreat from the goal of universal public library service will be, is a matter of conjecture. At this point all I'm willing to declare with certainty is that we're not in a growth industry. I was not an economics major, and I don't know the intricacies of the dance between government debtor and central-bank creditor. I would love to have someone prove my analysis wrong, because if I have this right, our future doesn't look particularly bright, though there is always inspiration, I suppose, in brilliantly maximizing service in an environment of sharply reduced circumstances. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #1 Public libraries are a classic middle-class subsidy. Not to mention an anachronism in the internet age. I actually use my local library, but these days there are far more people surfing the net or borrowing DVDs than there are borrowing books. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2007-06-02 20:08 |