Mrs. Williams Goes to Washington

The starring role at yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting was played by Margaret Williams of Tahoe Park (what up TP!!) who trotted her two young boys to the County building to ask her county supe, Roger Dickinson, if he could explain to her sons why “mommy should invest in an arena instead of their milk.”

Before you jump up and down at your keyboard because milk is a non-taxable grocery item, consider that when your budget is necessarily tight, the extra tax burden has to come out of somewhere. Consider the much-talked about impending $5 gallon of gas. They roll the sales tax into the pump price so you never really get to consider it, but that’s a major hit we’d take. (And not to spread the snark too thin, but I’d suggest that the kids milk should be very low on the list of things that get cut back.)

On the other hand you have comments in favor of the arena like this one from James Hofmann from River Park: “I don’t want to have to go to San Francisco to be entertained; I don’t want to have to travel to Marysville to be entertained.” The difference couldn’t be much starker: to be entertained. I’m guessing Mrs. Williams would consider a trip to San Francisco a once-every-presidential-election sort of thing.

If there is one thing I would ask proponents of the tax measure to consider, it would be the impact of $1 a week in extra sales tax on people for whom $1 a week is not an insignificant amount. You know, poor people. I’m pretty confident there is no argument against this.

Unknown's avatar

Author: CoolDMZ

"X-ray vision to see in between / Where's my kimono and my time machine?"

8 thoughts on “Mrs. Williams Goes to Washington”

  1. If Mrs. Williams and her kids are genuinely that close to losing their ability to buy food – so close that a quarter cent tax is going to send them over the edge – then we ought to take a long, hard look at what we’re doing with social services as a community and how much we’re contributing to local charity as individuals.

    Like

  2. Should we examine how we’re helping this family with their financial woes before or after we vote to raise her sales tax?

    Like

  3. Um, Carl, if a family has to go on food stamps because its taxes are too high do you think maybe those taxes need to be re-evaluated? Or at least not compounded by an added tax designed to ease the financial woes of Joe and Gavin Maloof, who I’m pretty sure can afford food? And what am I, turning into a Democrat? This is blowing my mind, man.

    Like

  4. Actually there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that a diet high in milk isn’t the healthiest way to get your nutrition (I’d google something for you, but it’s more fun to cite imaginary authority when doling out the snark).

    The US also has a little bit of an obesity problem, so maybe making gas more expensive will encourage people to run to work ala runnergirl.

    I think a giant arena that is empty 80% of the time and a lot of new retail downtown is just what Sacramento needs. Maybe the new arena district will be as pleasant as K street after dark.

    Like

  6. If people are that close to starving, then we’ve got a lot bigger problems than a sales tax increase. Sales taxes aren’t causing people to starve. If people are starving, it’s due to a lack of education, jobs, and fair social services.

    If we CUT sales taxes by a half percent, would Mrs. Williams life suddenly change? I doubt it. If you’re genuinely concerned about starvation for the Mrs. Williams’s of the world, and not using them as a prop for something you’d oppose anyway, fighting this tax isn’t going to help them. Giving to charity, lobbying local and state government and volunteering your time will.

    Like

  7. Lobbying them to do what? To not raise our sales taxes to benefit a rich private company? Or does that not count. And could you please refrain from suggesting that I give to charity? That’s just annoying.

    Like

  8. Carl, perhaps you’ve been absorbing a little too much NPR and not enough real life. It is so incredibly arrogant to suggest that working families wouldn’t have to budget if they were more educated. What do you think, people who must economize are illiterate deadbeats or something? And the notion that working families should have to rely on already overburdened charities rather than keep and use the money they earn is equally unrealistic. The insult of this kind of reasoning is compounded in this particular instance, when the tax we are discussing is not for the purpose of flood control or parks or law enforcement but so Joe and Gavin Maloof can have a free place of business to increase their wealth. Perhaps that is the kind of charity you applaud but I do not.

    Like

Comments are closed.