November 26, 2006

Your Tax Dollars at Work Lobbying For More of Your Tax Dollars

The Chattanooga Times Free Press explores the spending of your tax dollars by Tennessee cities and towns and government agencies to lobby the state legislature and Congress for more of your state and federal tax dollars.

There is something unseemly about one level of government spending tax dollars to lobby other levels of government for more tax dollars and it ought to be banned, though I suspect the legislature would be loathe to ban lobbying by city and county governments. The real solution is for government at all levels to tax less and spend less. Local governments only lobby the state legislature and Congress for funds because the state legislature and Congress control billions and trillions of tax dollars, respectively, and have created a myriad of ways to spend it - and are always coming up with more.

The way to get money out of politics is to get money out of government.