Hold on to your wallets if you live in the City of Seattle

Taken from Thursday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray wants you to pay even more than you already do. Here is what Ed Murray is going to ask for next: He wants the City Council to plan a levy to help pay for police and fire service in Seattle.

Who would vote against cops and firefighters? Who loves criminals and fires? Few people do, so of course, this will pass with 70 percent of the vote.

Murray says that they need a sophisticated computer system to track use of force, stops, and other aspects of police work. Of course, they do it all by abacus still in the Seattle Police Department, right?

I think they should update the police cars, too. Because right now, the cars are like the ones in the Flintstones, the officers actually have to run on the ground through a hole in the bottom of the car to power them. So if you want police cars that can actually catch up to fleeing motorists, you might want to vote for this too.

But you already pay so much in taxes. I pay so much in taxes. They get so much of our money already and they spend it on nonsense. Then, when it comes to the essentials … that’s where they say, oh you want those things, you’ve got to vote for higher taxes.

Here’s the way government should work if government was ethical, if we had people running government who cared one bit about you, your family, and your budget. They would take the gigantic pool of tax dollars that they already collect and they would say, what are our top priorities? They might determine police, fire, roads, criminal justice, and infrastructure. Then, they would fund all of those things first with the dollars they collect. Then they don’t need special police and fire levies.

But the game they play will be to spend the first dollars in on ridiculous things, and then tell the people, if you want a state-of-the-art police department, you’ve got to vote for higher property taxes.

Then the voters, being the willing dupes and fools that they’ve shown themselves to be when it comes to taxation in Seattle, will just approve it. When the reality is, if people started voting no on these levies, they would have to fund those priority items first.

Instead, give us a levy asking whether we want to spend a million on whatever the next art installation is you are planning with public dollars. Give us the levy option on that.

It’s the oldest game in the political book: We’ll fund the nonsense, then we’ll come to the people and say if you want the things you really care about, police, fire, parks, roads, you’ve got to vote additional property taxes for those things.

I can see the ad for this levy now. It’s going to show a criminal with one of those raccoon-bandit masks and he’s going to have a family tied up. He’s going to have a lighter in one hand and a gas can in the other. The announcer will say: ‘Do you want criminals burning your family? If you don’t want that, vote yes,’ with a big picture of Mayor Murray smiling with a hose.

Of course, I’m just howling at the moon because people in Seattle are going to automatically vote yes when this goes to the ballot.

Taken from Thursday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.