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by Mel Griffith
Most of us remember the story about the mother who went to watch her son Johnny in the parade. When she returned she reported that "everyone was out of step except Johnny." Others may have had a different opinion about who was out of step. The Bradley News Weekly seems to be having the same trouble Johnny did. Most everybody in Bradley County is out of step except them. The editors of the Weekly have determined that what Bradley County citizens need badly is a really big tax increase. They seem quite annoyed that hardly anyone agrees with them. They admit that if the commissioners really did vote for a huge tax increase, the public would replace them with someone like Pete Edwards. Actually, that's not a bad idea, but it's probably not one that appeals to incumbent commissioners. The Weekly thinks that hiking taxes another 75 cents per hundred on top of the present $2.18 would be about right. That would amount to a 34% tax increase, which is a bit more than most folks get for an annual raise. Remember that inflation is already taken care of by constant property reappraisals, so no increase in the tax rate is necessary to account for it. Actually, the Bradley County tax rate isn't really $2.18 anywhere except in the city of Cleveland anyway. That's because Bradley County has a separate fire tax, which most counties don't have. The real tax rate is either $2.37 in the rural fire area where the fire tax is 19 cents or $2.70 in the fringe area where the fire tax is 52 cents. It is $2.18 in the city, but when you add in the city's $1.65 tax rate, the total property tax rate is $3.83.
I don't know how commissioner Brown and his folks run their stove factory, but I suspect that if they discover that they are turning out a better product than their competition at a lower cost, they probably don't call a meeting to figure how to spend more money building each stove. I don't know how Bowater is run either, but I suspect that if they are producing a superior product at a lower cost they probably aren't trying very hard to drive up costs. Strangely, when our school system achieves the kind of efficiency that industry constantly strives for, the Weekly sees it as a problem that needs to be fixed. Trying to figure out how good an education our students are getting by measuring how much is spent on it is like trying to figure out how good your steak is by finding out how much it cost to feed the steer. We need to focus on quality of the output, not quantity of the input, to determine if there is a problem. Our test scores and awards in other areas indicate that there isn't one.
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