Kudos to Rostra blogger Bradley J. Fikes for this post calling out the thinly-veiled message in the U-T that actually precluded the sales tax proponents’ simple message:
“Agree to a sales tax increase or you will die.”
May I suggest we haven’t even begun to be spoon-fed this message. The coming months will be filled with it.
This is the strategy of the City Hall Machine. Keep telling all of us this message over and over until we finally say, “OK, here’s my wallet!”
For the folks on this blog that are beginning to call out Mayor Jerry Sanders, my congratulations. Nothing warms my heart quite like seeing the “Republican” Mayor announcing his support for a sales tax flanked by labor union puppets Todd Gloria and Marti Emerald. If you really want to ruin your evening, check out the picture for this Voice of San Diego article showing Marti Emerald rubbing the Mayor’s shoulders.
Revolting, isn’t it?
Getting angry yet?
Careful, the City Hall Machine doesn’t like that. Better listen up (and more importantly pay up!) or “you might die.”
This November’s forthcoming decision on whether to increase the sales tax is a critical decision; one that will determine who is in charge in our local society.
Is it all of us, the citizens who work and contribute part of our earnings to our City government through property and sales taxes?
Or is it the public employee labor union bosses?
Have we reached a point where the citizenry is content to keep giving up freedom by allowing local government (read: government employee labor unions and downtown special interests) to literally hold us hostage for more money?
Our own government is out of control, and has chosen to threaten us with our own safety rather than to scale back its excess. It has chosen to toss us some meaningless reform breadcrumbs while it feasts on caviar.
The City Hall Machine will assure us with sleazy grins and hand shakes, “it’s just a few extra pennies,” and “trust us, we’re reforming.” And oh by the way, if you didn’t catch it the first fourteen times, “you might die if you don’t give in.”
I meandered over to dictionary.com just for this blog post.
Definition first.
“…unrestrained exercise of power.”
The word? Tyranny.
We can simply sit back and succumb to the bullying and allow ourselves to be held hostage by the Machine. We can believe the Machine or simply tire of resisting it, and we can become Winston at the end of George Orwell’s 1984.
Or we can say NO MORE, and destroy this sales tax at the ballot box.