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Bainbridge had real 'tea party'
(by Dave Lange - April 22, 2009)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Bainbridge had real 'tea party'
Some 1,000 people showed up in downtown Cleveland last week as part of a national protest against higher taxes and federal spending. They called their events "tea parties," as if they bore any resemblance to the courageous American revolutionaries who protested against unreasonable taxes imposed by rich foreign royalty on poor colonial working stiffs.
A more realistic "tea party" occurred 20 miles away, where two Bainbridge Township trustees dumped the attempt by a rich, out-of-state development company to line its silk pockets with an income tax imposed on low-wage retail workers.
In the imaginary world of the downtown protesters, it is today's American royalists who need protection from their own government's proposal to restore tax rates for the wealthiest 1 percent to what they were eight years ago. You know, back when the federal budget was running a surplus, instead of a $400 billion annual deficit, and the economy was booming.
In the real world of Bainbridge, Trustees Matthew Lynch and Linda White turned back yet another plot to redistribute wealth from people on the low end of the income scale to the rich. They rejected a bailout for McGill Property Group, the Florida-based corporation that owns the Marketplace shopping center on Aurora Road (Route 43).
McGill had proposed the formation of a joint economic development district between Bainbridge and Aurora in order to impose a municipal income tax on workers at Walmart, Kohl's, Dick's and other stores and restaurants in the section of the shopping center south of Aurora Road. Townships like Bainbridge cannot legally collect income taxes, but they can share them by forming taxing districts with neighboring municipalities like Aurora. Bainbridge previously formed a JEDD with the City of Solon to collect taxes from workers in the section on the north side of Aurora Road.
This would have been different. Instead of the tax money benefiting the communities and their citizens, the first $1.2 million was to be diverted to the McGill Property Group as reimbursement for infrastructure improvements. Those improvements were necessary, by the way, only because of the additional traffic being brought into the area to enrich the developer and the store owners.
Mr. Lynch objected to collecting taxes from minimum-wage store clerks to help the developer "pay off his debts." Ms. White said, "I cannot support this proposal in giving a developer the taxpayers' money."
Developer Matthew McGill argued that most workers already are paying income taxes to their home municipalities and that, once his company took its $1.2 million cut off the top, Bainbridge and Aurora would collect many more millions for years to come.
So it's OK to take taxes away from communities where working-class people live, in order to reimburse a developer now, for something done in the past, which had to be done for the developer's benefit anyway, because those taxes eventually will benefit well-off suburbs where minimum-wage jobs have relocated, while towns where those jobs used to be can suffer even more.
That's like giving more tax breaks to the richest 1 percent of Americans now, so the federal deficit will keep growing, while the economy keeps shrinking, and jobs keep moving to China, until the communists demand that their loans be repaid, at which time the few working people left will be holding the bag. And it won't be a tea bag.
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