Through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks…
— Ecclesiastes 10:18, NIV
As mentioned in Part Four of this editorial series, a couple of questions have come to my mind, after spending the past month thinking about the Pagosa Fire Protection District’s proposed ‘impact fees’:
Does our Fire Protection District really need to extract more money out of taxpayer pockets?
Are fire districts in general becoming another example of excessively-funded government jobs programs?
I also suggested earlier that, for some reason, Pagosa Springs has tended to attract fiscal conservatives to its community, and the community has also tended to elect people claiming to be fiscal conservatives to local government boards.
But it seems like, no sooner are the fiscal conservatives sworn into office, then they begin to propose higher taxes and fees to fund new buildings, more government vehicles and equipment, and expanded public infrastructure.
I hopefully offered some useful information in yesterday’s installment, by pointing out that — for a couple of political reasons — the Pagosa Fire Protection District tax revenues have, over the past eight years, ballooned from $999,543 in 2015…
…to nearly $4.2 million in 2023.
An increase of more than 400%, during a time when nearly every family expense — food, clothing, rent, fuel, utilities — has increased fairly dramatically.
This (obscene?) increase in Fire District tax collections was allowed to take place by the (supposedly fiscally conservative?) volunteers serving on the District’s Board of Directors. Although the population increased by less than 1.5% annually during those eight years — and the number of neighborhoods served did no change at all — the District’s extraction of taxes has quadrupled.
But the District now wants even more money, and is proposing to extract it from new home construction and new commercial construction through ‘impact fees’, as has been permitted by Colorado legislation passed last spring.
This is not unusual. The Pagosa Springs Town Council and Archuleta Board of County Commissioners collaborated in 2022 in an attempt to increase local sales taxes by 37%, only to see the measure shot down by the voters by a 3-to-1 margin.
But the Fire District is not required to place their proposed impact fee before the voters… because it’s supposedly a “fee”.
Of course, the never ending quest for increased government spending is not only a local issue. And it defies political allegiances.
When Barack Obama moved into the White House in 2009, in the midst of a global financial meltdown, he quickly jacked up federal employment and contracted labor from about 10 million workers to 11.3 million. He later managed to reduce federal employment back down to 8.7 million by the time Donald Trump took office.
The Trump administration promptly pumped federally-funded employment back up to 10.9 million, mainly through a 40% increase in federal contracts.
The Daily Post, over the past 20 years, has been — generally — a voice for fiscally conservative, efficient government. We’ve been writing mostly about Pagosa Springs, a small town with small town problems. Over-priced housing. Low wages. Lack of resources. Inexperienced leadership.
But this controversy around the Fire District impact fees has caused me to wonder about my earlier statement:
Are fire districts in general becoming another example of excessively-funded government jobs programs?
When I was born, in 1952, Pagosa Springs was barely a fly-speck on the map of Colorado. The boys who had served in World War II had come back home and taken jobs at the sawmills, or on ranches herding cattle, or tending sheep in the San Juan Mountains. Maybe teaching school, or running a road grader. Many of us in Pagosa grew up in that type of world — where men were expected to be the breadwinners and women were expected to be homemakers and didn’t much participate in the labor force.
We can discern that lack of female participation illustrated in this Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate graph, created by the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis, up until about 1975:
Between 1948 and about 1966, the Participation Rate of adult Americans in the labor force remained at around 59-60 percent.
By 1975, the rate had inched up to about 61 percent. Women were leaving the kitchen and becoming secretaries, nurses, bookkeepers, teachers, cashiers.
But beginning in about 1999, something rather different began to happen:
Many people stopped participating in the “labor force”. Which is to say, Americans — millions of Americans — began to spend their time doing things that were not tracked by the government. Working ‘under the table’? Working in the ‘black market’? Playing video games?
Posting lip-sync videos on TikTok?
We don’t know what millions of Americans were doing, starting in about 1999.
But I believe this question directly relates to “excessively-funded government jobs programs…”
The phrase “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop” does not typically appear in the Bible (except in the translation known as The Living Bible) but our Western, Protestant culture has long accepted the idea that a person who lacks honest work is likely, soon enough, to engage in dishonest work.
Meanwhile, the thrust of modern capitalism has been to replace (inefficient?) human workers, whenever possible, with efficient machines.
The American economy is built upon a value system that, at its core, strives to make the American population unemployed, in a quest for higher profits.
But also, an economy that desperately needs to sell its products and services to consumers.
Is it possible that a government agency that appears, on the surface, greedy for more and more revenue, is simply doing its part to create “replacement” jobs as those are eliminated by private industry?
Jobs that pay well? And keep people consuming, and paying income taxes, and sales taxes, and property taxes?
Jobs that give real people something to do? And money to buy things with?
Read Part Seven, on Monday…