Come on, who are they trying to fool with this gambit?
A quarter-cent sales tax that would provide $40 million a year for children’s crisis and wellness programs will probably make the county ballot next fall.
A regional consortium of 20 providers of mental health and other support services for children says St. Louis County children are suffering because they lack critical funding for services geared toward mental illness, physical abuse, substance abuse, pregnancy and homelessness.
The county, despite having more than three times the youth population of any other county in the state, is lagging behind its smaller neighbors, including the city of St. Louis and St. Charles, Lincoln and Jefferson counties, say members of the group called Putting Kids First. All of those counties have established a sales tax to fund mental health services, substance abuse and child abuse prevention programs. The most recent was Lincoln County, which approved a quarter-cent sales tax in November 2006.
The money raised by the sales tax is going to get spent with the very people pushing it, hey? So aren’t they a special interest group doing a little rent-seeking? Oh, I forget, they’re doing it for the children, for whose benefit everyone should bleed and sacrifice, except of course those who Serve them. They should get tax money.
And phooey, again, on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for supporting it and continuing to identify sales tax rates in the terms of a horse race or the arms race. What, are we in the county afraid that the city will break the beautiful, wonderful, happy 10% sales tax barrier first?
That’s exactly what I thought when I read the article. This has been coming for some time. Over the last 5 yrs or so, the Post has rarely let a month go by without running an article bemoaning the lack of funding for one mental health scheme or another. For some reason they want us all in therapy. And they want the govt. (“us all” again) to pay for it. It’s really kind of creepy when you think about it. Why the headshrinker fetish?
The teachers unions do the same thing. They come tapping on your door whenever there’s a property tax increase on the ballot. They could at least be honest enough to say “I want a pay raise, and I want to take it out of your bank account”. The Post loves them too.