Regarding your recent editorial, “Don’t gut all county services.”
Let’s see … gas prices are up, along with health insurance premiums, local permits, fees, and, to pay for Island Transit, sales taxes. The library levy passed. Coupeville School District is looking for our generosity to pay for a technical improvement levy. Don’t forget the pending theft from our wallets to pay for land conservation. I’m sure all other levy seekers are standing by to stick out their hands as well. Meanwhile wages … stayed the same!
To all government sympathizers, since you love giving your money to government so much, write out a check payable to the Island County Treasurer for $5,000 (since you have such deep and caring pockets) and send it to them. Do not be surprised if they come back next year and demand $10,000. Did you send in your check yet? Didn?t think so.
Does anyone know who wrote these little passages?
“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing, by every device, the public debt, on the principle of its being a public blessing?”
“What more is necessary to make us wise and happy people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens – a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”
“The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth, and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning-knife.”
Answer: Thomas Jefferson 1798, 1799 and 1821.
Perhaps suspension, better yet elimination of some statutory requirements, and programs both mandated and non-mandated would be a wise idea. Break out the pruning-knife!
Ken Wolf
Coupeville
