The Wall Street Journal today published an opinion piece on a public uprising in Wichita that defeated a good old boy deal to exempt a downtown hotel from a large portion of the taxes that the other hotels in town have to pay. The manner in which the Wichita City Council and their masters passed this by a 6 – 1 margin so enraged the electorate that it was overturned by a populace that was fed up with this sort of dealing.
It was impossible not to think of the back room dealing in Evansville’s recent past with respect to the scheme to remove the Homestead Tax Credit, the deals cut for the McCurdy and the Executive Inn empty lot that did not bear fruit, and a host of other deals including the ball fields that refuse to move that smack of crony capitalism. Please read the article and pay particular attention to the closing lines.
“But voters were so enraged by the insider dealing that they launched a petition drive for a voter referendum. Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by hotel advocates, almost 10 times more than opponents spent, voters routed the subsidy 61% to 39%.
The elites are stunned, but they shouldn’t be. The core issue is fairness—and not of the soak-the-rich kind that President Obama practices. One of the leaders of the opposition, Derrick Sontag, director of Americans for Prosperity in Kansas, says that what infuriated voters was the veneer of “political cronyism.”
What Americans seem to want most from government these days is equal treatment. They increasingly realize that powerful government nearly always helps the powerful, whether the beneficiaries are a union that can carve a sweet deal as part of an auto bailout or corporations that can hire lobbyists to write a tax loophole.
This is why Americans hate the Obama Administration’s Solyndra handouts, or rebel when city hall abuses eminent domain to bully people out of their homes for a big business the way New London, Connecticut did in the Kelo case for Pfizer Corp. Let’s hope for more such popular uprisings.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203986604577255200049450794.html
