DEAR EDITOR:
Premeditated, cold-blooded, deficit spending is bad government.
When it enacted Section 99268.12 of our Public Utilities Code, our
Legislature authorized the transit agencies to collect only
15percent of their operating costs from riders’ fares.
DEAR EDITOR:
Premeditated, cold-blooded, deficit spending is bad government. When it enacted Section 99268.12 of our Public Utilities Code, our Legislature authorized the transit agencies to collect only 15percent of their operating costs from riders’ fares.
Thus, they intentionally engineered budget deficits of 85 percent of their operating costs that the taxpayers must subsidize. When you add capital and fixed costs, taxpayers are paying about 99 percent of the costs of public-sector transit. This may be great for public-sector union employees of VTA and the other transit agencies, but it is adding to unbearable burdens for taxpayers.
Shifting the transport costs of these intentional deficits onto motorists through such devices as vehicle license fees, gasoline taxes, etc., is a self-defeating philosophy our Legislature should reverse. Instead of deterring self-sufficient motorists, our leaders should admit their failed experiment in social transit and privatize public-sector transit. We must get government out of the transportation business.
Increased deficit spending by adopting Prop. 56 on the March ballot will be throwing gasoline on the fire. Unless we want to follow the course the Soviet planners charted for the USSR, we must reject socialist transportation, by bus, rail, Lite Rail, Caltrain, Bullet Train, etc., that fuels the governments’ budget fiascoes.
Until government stops wasting money to move empty buses and trains, taxpayers should not be expected to bear larger tax burdens to pay for politicians’ pet pork-barrel projects. Taxing motorists out of their cars will produce a socialist state like the ones in Europe that people fled to America to escape.
Joseph P. Thompson, Gilroy
Submitted Wednesday, Jan. 7
