18 ms·
Anti-Tax Fervor Closed Their Libraries. Now Residents Are Trying to Go It Alone
- munchbunny 8y agoThis is a great lesson in how we tend not to notice the effect of these services paid for with our tax dollars... until they're missing.
- romed 8y agoThe people did not vote down the library tax because they were unaware of the library. They voted it down because they did not value the library. I think it's great that the townspeople who do value libraries are telling the outsiders to fuck right off. People in American cities and towns have been subsidizing their exurban and rural neighbors for many decades, while those people have systematically and intentionally undermined the very cities and towns that benefit them. At some point the proponents of civilization have to draw a line.
- jimmaswell 8y agoLibraries served a very important purpose, but nowadays with the proliferation of computers/smartphones and all literary classics, scientific information, etc. being freely available online, physical libraries feel like less of a necessity. They can serve as hubs for other community activities, but those can just as easily be held elsewhere. Only real use I've had for one in the past years is the odd time I had to print or fax something. Maybe libraries should eventually be downsized to simple community cybercafes with links on the desktop to some of these resources and a printer/fax machine.
- magduf 8y agoThat's largely what a lot of modern town libraries are now. They have a bunch of computers for people who don't own their own, and a bunch of books that they've had for decades.
- nck4222 8y agoAh, the old "I've don't need the service therefore no one does" argument. It's obvious you don't use libraries, because you left out a couple dozen other services they provide that are not easily replaced. I'm also not sure how a community center is supposed to be easily replaced without tax revenue. While the "libraries are outdated" line is oft-repeated, it's still inaccurate. Libraries provide large economic impacts, on top of less easy to measure things like being community centers. Here's one article about a study that shows for every $1 in tax put towards a library, it generates anywhere from $2.50-$5.00+ in economic benefit, depending on how you measure it: https://www.toledoblade.com/local/2016/04/28/Toledo-Lucas-County-Public-Library-gives-2-74-value-per-tax-dollar.html?abnpageversion=evoke https://www.toledoblade.com/local/2016/04/28/Toledo-Lucas-Co... If you google for more, you'll find a dozen other examples.
- jimmaswell 8y ago>I'm also not sure how a community center is supposed to be easily replaced without tax revenue. Any of the various other places that happen to be around where you can congregate, like a park with a gazebo. The value of publicly accessible computers and printers is obvious, I'm just not so sure about all the other things that a library does. I'm curious exactly how this study quantifies all this.
- mbreese 8y agoIn Oregon? A gazebo? In the winter?
- dantheman 8y agoAll of those things could perhaps done even better if they weren't pretending books was still their main service. Perhaps an office in city hall could have computer 24/7 or other things. I like libraries - but they shouldn't be welfare/job centers -- we should build institutions that specialize in that and can be evaluated on their effectiveness.
- dlp211 8y agoThis is an example of perfect being the enemy of good.
- lostlogin 8y agoThink of them from the perspective of others too though. Where does the person who can’t afford internet get a connection for free? Where does the supply of books for children come from? They can memorise several in a day easily. Have a look at the people who are there working or doing homework. It’s quiet, safe and warm. As much as a screen is easy, a physical book is still nicer to read from for many people too.
- romed 8y agoAccording to Pew in 2016 half of adults reported using a public library in the last 12 months. The annual report "Public Libraries in the United States" estimates 4.5 library visits per capita in 2015. Libraries are one of the most-used services.
- clintonb 8y agoI wouldn't discount libraries so quickly. There are still some in our society without smartphones and computers. There are also those who simply cannot afford books. Local libraries are a resource for these families. Additionally, some libraries have experts on staff who can help with research in areas of genealogy and history.
- vkou 8y ago> but nowadays with the proliferation of computers/smartphones and all literary classics, scientific information, etc. being freely available online The problem is, all this stuff isn't freely available online. Yes, there is enough online information online to put together a 6th grade essay on the Battle of Gettysburg. But if you actually want a more-then-superficial understanding of a subject, you will, at some point, hit the shelves, and crack open a dozen books. The classics may be freely out of copyright, but books that analyse them aren't. Most of the literature of the 20th century is still under copyright. There are thousands of free online courses, each of which would cover ~100 pages in a book. Yet, there are over a hundred million published books. Many of them are out of date, or dreck. And many of them contain information that you won't find on the internet - for any price, and definitely not 'free'. You will find many of them at your library, though (Or available through inter-library loans). Another thing that you will find at your library is a librarian, who can help you figure out what you are should be looking for. Google won't do this for you. Just because you can, in five seconds, find a half-baked, incomplete blog post tutorial on how to ship HelloWorld in the flavor-of-the-week-crap.js framework, doesn't mean that a library is useless in 2018.
- jimmaswell 8y agoI've never had to use a physical book for any of the papers I got an A on in college, except in the few cases an overzealous English professor made it part of the requirements that you cite a physical book, in which case I had to find some token fact in one just to satisfy it. In addition to all the great content you can find free online, libraries get free access to EBSCO databases. I've also never needed the help of a librarian, ever. Having the old books around will remain useful only up until the point we find a way to fully digitize all of it and make "borrowing" solutions more widespread/work around the copyright issues. For now for 99% of cases you don't need a physical book.
- geggam 8y agoI like my ereader. I can carry a thousand books and not break a sweat. Unfortunately my ereader doesnt provide the community with a quiet place for the less fortunate or a way to read those digitized books you have. A library is not just a place of books, it is a place of learning for those who arent in college who like to learn on their own .... not to get an A.
- stevenwoo 8y agoI live between Palo Alto and Mountain View, and parking lot for the local library closest to me is always nearly full from 10-5, I can imagine that if there is this high of a demand for public libraries in Silicon Valley, there might be demand in other areas of the country.
- gamechangr 8y agoWell let's look at that... Palo Alto/MV are considered one of the thought capitals of America, so that's not a clear correlation. If Boston's library's are full, I'm sure Detroit's library would be too. I wouldn't think that Boston/Manhattan/Palo Alto library use would have any correlation to half of America. Also, anyplace where rent ranges are higher free study space is more valuable.
- stevenwoo 8y agoThis survey from 2016 says the non library users are the outlier among those over 18 by a wide margin. I guess this could be biased by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and whoever else funds the Pew Charitable Trust, though it is non partisan by charter. http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/a-portrait-of-those-who-have-never-been-to-libraries/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/a-portrait-of-those-wh...
- tareqak 8y agoI know that my suggestion sounds like a knee-jerk reaction, but I wish that each and every public service had one or more prominently-displayed large signs on their premises saying how much their expenses were and where the money came from to pay for it. My reasoning? It's easy to tunnel-vision on your own financial situation when you are sufficiently ignorant of what services your taxes are paying for.
- irrational 8y agoI like this. Would every highway, road, and street need to have a sign every so many miles/blocks?
- oiuew83 8y agoI know Oregon does this to an extent; I have seen signs located next to state highway projects "Your tax dollars at work.".
- ensignavenger 8y agoThese signs rarely state how much the project costs, though. They just say it was part of such and such tax. At least the ones I have seen.
- tareqak 8y agoYeah, the actual cost is what I am interested in as well as how much was paid for via taxes.
- maxxxxx 8y agoAlso add costs of pollution and health costs for accidents.
- howard941 8y agoIt surprised the hell out of me as it will you but ignorance of how much it cost and where the money goes wasn't an issue here. These Douglas county voters mailed in their rejection of a dedicated library tax. Most everywhere else in the country your suggestion makes sense. In my county library funds are bundled in the county general ad valorem property tax.
- tick_tock_tick 8y agoMost governments and municipalities do a horrible job of articulating what their constituents taxes go towards. People see giant buckets and have a very hard time converting that into what they see and use day to day.
- wahern 8y agoOTOH, broken out expenses often serve only as fodder for bikeshedding cynics who want to rail about big government mismanagement. For example, most people's notions about NASA's budgetary process begin and end with million dollar toilets. Overly specific knowledge about budgets can be poisonous.
- RandomInteger4 8y agoThe million dollar toilet example doesn't sound like a broken out expense, but instead the exact opposite.
- geggam 8y agoIts more likely a black ops type off the record funding was absorbed by the toilets.
- tyingq 8y agoIt might be deliberate. Taxpayers would see how things like badly managed and/or lavish pensions eat up large parts of the budget.
- Retric 8y agoPensions make up less of the budget than you might think. A rather large chunk of the budget is spent on Social Security or other programs have a low employee to cost ratio. The DoD for example spends quite a bit on defense contractors and has relatively few people who stay long enough to collect a pension.
- 8y ago
- alexanderwept 8y agoAnti-tax fervor seems like a scapegoat. The library wasn't producing enough value for the residents to care about continuing it and I don't blame them. This is how a democratic government is supposed to work - eventually things will converge to the median view. I've been voting against my libraries for as long as I've been able to vote. They're just not super valuable to me - they're not keeping kids out of trouble, in fact, it seems like kids go to the library to get into trouble - junkies routinely overdose in them. In the past 3 years, I've purchased at least 70 books. Each time I purchased a book, I checked to see whether I could get it from the library and they didn't have it. My county library system has 2,038 books of and about feminism and ~300 books of and about LGBT issues, but it has scarcely anything about conservative / right wing political philosophy or Abrahamic theology. It doesn't have a single book by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Evola, or Carl Schmitt. The library doesn't seem like a service that's open to everyone, it seems like a subsidiary for a specific viewpoint and agenda.
- solarwind 8y agoI'm not sure if most people know that the first libraries in America were privately funded subscription services, established by Benjamin Franklin. The first American lending library (Library Company of Philadelphia) was set up in 1731, where it operated for literally over 100 years as a private institution, and exists to this day as a nonprofit. The first taxpayer-funded public library was established 102 years later, in 1833 (New Hampshire Town Library). The optional market good served its clientele better than the non-optional public service for over 100 years. From the Revolutionary War to 1800, when the national government was in Philadelphia, the Library Company also served as the Library of Congress. Until the 1850s it was the largest public library in America. All of the books the Library Company acquired year by year over more than two and a half centuries are still on its shelves, along with many others added since it was transformed into a research library in the 1950s. In the 21st century, the Library Company serves as a resource for a variety of readers, from high school students to senior scholars, from novelists to film producers, and anyone else with an interest in our collections. https://librarycompany.org/about-lcp/ https://librarycompany.org/about-lcp/
- 8y ago
- oiuew83 8y agoThe central rural parts of Oregon are killing their communities out of ignorance. In 2014 Josephine county voted down a tax to keep their jail open. Another counties entire sheriff's department resigned recently, due to lack of funding to properly staff the office; they were all burning the candle at both ends. There are other examples of this behavior over the last decade that are easily Googled, so I'll avoid posting it all. If you talk to these people, or see their commentaries online, many of them are thinking they'll just make taxes low, and of course someone will build a factory, in the middle of nowhere, with a poorly informed workforce, and no social services. The locals don't want to shoulder the cost of education and security, but of course some private business owner will.
- magduf 8y agoI don't see the problem here, though I am questioning who's providing police services in that county now. If people want to vote to refuse to fund having a police service, how is that wrong? If they want to go without, that's their choice. Of course, that could have some pretty nasty consequences, but again, they voted for it, and it's their choice. I do hope, however, that the state and federal authorities will keep an eye on things, and if anything bad happens which results in a huge lawsuit, that the people of that county will be literally forced (even if it means forcibly seizing all their property) to pay the judgments. As a very wise Frenchman once wrote, "every nation gets the government it deserves". The people in these rural counties are getting the government they deserve.
- pimmen 8y agoParent post didn't use the word wrong, the statement was that they're killing their communities out of ignorance. It sounds from your post that you whole heartedly agree it is ignorance. So, I definitely see a problem with it!
- ip26 8y agoAs a very wise Frenchman once wrote, "every nation gets the government it deserves". Yes, but we can still castigate them for it.
- 8y ago
- gottebp 8y agoThese things are never so cut and dry. Politicians know to cut funding from the most visible places first -- parks, police, roads, fire, schools, etc. It allows them to justify raising taxes. Then they turn and put the new revenue towards something else entirely. Finally the whole cycle repeats decade after decade, until [sales tax + property tax + fed income tax + social security (12% counting employer contribution) + state income tax + vehicle registration] is over 50%. Without trust earned through good action over time, good citizens are trapped with nothing left but to pull the plug.
- dv_dt 8y agoPerhaps there exist socially and economically positive things which taxes can fund more beneficially than individual spending for equivalent services.
- gottebp 8y agoPerhaps you misunderstand. I am not opposed to taxes that support the common good. Simply pointing out why it is hard to distinguish between reasonable taxation and excessive taxation made necessary by irresponsible use of revenue.
- dv_dt 8y agoIn your story cycle, there is this sort of promotion of learned helplessness of the citizen which can only end in pulling the plug. Perhaps I mistook that focus on the tax aspect instead of the benefit aspect of governing as being generically anti-governement. In general if you want more efficient use of money, I think it's better payoff to focus on the actual uses and how to get to the benefits more efficiently instead of concentrating on reducing costs. I feel that's true for businesses as well as governments.
- mikeash 8y agoGood citizens could elect good representatives who spend wisely. Unfortunately, that takes more effort than voting straight ticket once every four years and complaining the rest of the time.
- slededit 8y agoAs the song goes “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. The town tested out life without libraries and saw it was bad for kids. This got the votes to reopen them. I think sometimes it’s healthy to see if we “really need it”. Especially when physical books are becoming obsolete.
- jimmaswell 8y agoWhy can't the kids just hang out somewhere else?
- vkou 8y agoWhere? Smoking weed behind the dumpsters? Loitering in the mall? Watching someone scream at a video game on twitch.tv? I'd much rather encourage them to spend time at a library instead. Kids love to read.
- jimmaswell 8y agoI'd like to see malls made more friendly to kids once again, yes.
- pm24601 8y agohttp://deadmalls.com/ http://deadmalls.com/ no further comment needed :-)
- kamarg 8y agoI don't know about these libraries specifically but all of the libraries by where I live serve many more purposes than just a warehouse for physical books. Free internet access, community gardens, 3d printers, audio books, some even run classes for kids on various topics like personal finance and how to put together a resume.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoTo be totally fair, I might get upset over a "library tax" that turned out to be actually funding community gardens. Those aren't even related ideas.
- andyv 8y agoThere is a wonderful documentary "Flint Town" (currently on NetFlix) that follows the police department of Flint, MI, a town that is struggling. At one point, officers end up campaigning for a local ballot issue to renew a tax that supposedly supports them, but in reality doesn't. There is a vague promise that they will see the money if the measure is renewed. After passage, the scene where the Flint city council ultimately screws over the chief of police is appalling. Municipal politics can be brutal too.
- clintonb 8y ago> Municipal politics can be brutal too. Municipal politics are the most brutal. I've seen fistfights at school board meetings! National politics get a lot of attention, but local is where citizens are directly affected.
- sevensor 8y agoI had a co-worker who served on a rural school board. He would get death threats from the more radically anti-tax constituents of his school district. They were opposed to the whole "socialist" enterprise of educating the community's children. More than once he woke up to find a dead groundhog on his front step.
- MaysonL 8y agoSee K. C. Constantine's Rocksburg series of murder mysteries. They're set in a small city in the western Rust Belt of Pennsylvania, featuring a police chief who has many runins with the rest of the municapal government. Then again, my kid brother, a liberal Democrat, spent 20 years in his local government in the most Republican congressional district in New Jersey, serving on the planning commission(20 years), the school board(13 years), and a regional board of education. So cats and dogs can occasionally co-exist peacefully.
- 40acres 8y agoGovernments in general do a terrible job at PR. I remember a "controversy" during the Obama administration which was caused by the phrase "you didn't build that" which was basically him trying to promote the stability and infrastructure that the government provides for innovation and entrepreneurship. For a rich nation like the US there's a lot we need to be thankful to our government for. The fact that I can hop on a cross country flight and have no worries at all about clashing with another plane is a testament to the FAA. Organizations like the NIH provide valuable research for drug development. DARPA help to fund the internet! The government deserves loads of criticism but at the same time our views of it are so cynical it leads to situations like this.
- sstorie 8y agoIt's pretty damn hard to do a "good" job when a statement like that is twisted so quickly to mean something drastically different. The fact that certain people ate that up like candy is troubling on several levels.
- pstuart 8y agoYour example is dangerous territory for political discussion here. The Obama example cited was intentionally misquoted (by providing a snippet without the full context) to make him bad. Government PR to a certain degree is a good thing to promote support and appreciation for programs, but it can get into dangerous territory when wielded with the intent to deceive (as we're now seeing).
- s73v3r_ 8y agoI think that's their point; that when government tries to do PR, there is a segment of the population that, depending on who is in power, will twist those words.
- Buttons840 8y agoI've wondered if this is part of why politicians are so long winded and won't directly answer questions. Not just so they can appear neutral and avoid answering hard questions, but if they actually say something meaningful in a few words it will probably be taken out of context and used against them.
- klodolph 8y agoUsed to live in Oregon... it's hard to really pin the blame on anyone, here. Politicians are voted in and out of office and ballot measures are passed mostly based on issues with short-term visibility. In the heyday of the timber industry it was hard to justify more cautious and measured approaches to growth, and easier to fund projects with bonds based on projections of property tax growth that turned out to be optimistic. There is a bit of an anti-tax fervor in Oregon, I wouldn't claim that it's unique or special compared to other parts of the country but it exists. Oregon passed a "kicker" which makes it so any state revenue surplus gets refunded to the taxpayers. This makes it basically impossible for the state to save any tax revenue surplus, so budget shortfalls can mean immediate reductions in service and infrastructure projects are paid for with future obligations. This is really nothing more than leverage (and extra risk exposure) on a state scale... when the economy does well you get money back from the state, when the economy does poorly you get service cuts. It's easy to see both sides of this issue... it's easy to see why it got passed (I overpaid taxes, so give me the money back!) and it's easy to see why it's a bad idea. This is an unintended side effect of the way the political process works in Oregon. The ballot initiatives in Oregon (called the "Oregon system" even though South Dakota did it first) were a big force for progress in the early 20th century (e.g. women's suffrage in 1912) but ballot initiatives seem to really suck at making any kind of coherent or sensible fiscal policy. And that leads to today, with rural Oregon paying the price for decades of mediocre fiscal policy, once propped up on timber profits but not anymore. I'm really glad we have the initiative system but I'm also glad it's limited in scope and power. I can vote on whether marijuana should be legal but I can't vote to change the Fed's target rate.
- sievebrain 8y agoYou see the same in most governments though. A surplus is rarely banked. Instead a budget surplus is immediately spent on structural spending like increased wages. A ballot measure to force the government to give back budget surplus is a smart move - the borrowing and service cuts give people a direct linkage to how their economy is doing. Look at Germany. Huge budget surplus last year which is now predicted to be spent entirely on helping migrants who turned up after Merkel invited them in. Would the Germans have liked the money back? Most likely! Were they ever going to be given that option when politicians had the option of feeling good about themselves through additional spending? No way!
- anon7429 8y agoHow's that libertarian (anarchist) utopia working out?
- dgzl 8y ago> until voters turned down a tax increase that would have kept the library system open Is anyone else wondering why a tax increase is needed to keep the library open? Does that mean it wasn't sustainable? Could it be due to rising minimum wage? Is it reasonable to blame the voters? I grew up on generational property in rural southern Oregon, and it's true that there's plenty of anti-tax sentiment, including from Myself. A small town near where I grew up ceased it's police force, and is instead patrolled by county sheriffs stationed in nearby towns. The truth is there are many people out here who just want to live their private country lives, many of who have small income, and spend their year fishing and hunting for food.
- tomjen3 8y agoI don't think a library has been self-sustaining since they stopped being private and started being public. Technically libraries should get cheaper to operate, since at least the once around here now don't have staff most of the time, requiring a card to get in. Honestly, it seems like most of those communities are dying out though.
- dgzl 8y agoSorry, by sustainable I meant with including whatever standard tax the library collected each year, minus the increase that apparently is needed. You could say the communities are shrinking, but you have to understand that they weren't really ever big to begin with.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoLibraries don't collect taxes.
- jacobolus 8y agoCity dwellers dramatically subsidize American suburbs and rural areas. Roads, water, the electric grid, communication networks, hospitals, fire suppression, law enforcement, courts, schools, mail delivery, .... public infrastructure and services get more expensive per capita when people are more spread out. On top of that, the federal government intentionally spends large amounts of money in poorer areas of the country (e.g. on military bases and weapons contractors) as an explicit geographical wealth redistribution scheme. 80 years ago the rural poverty in many parts of America was a story of shocking destitution. If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes on corporate profits, very large incomes, large inheritances, etc., expand enforcement against tax evasion, and eliminate legal or quasi-legal tax-avoidance loopholes. However, the wealthy in this country have largely succeeded in a 50-year campaign to redistribute wealth upward.
- poulsbohemian 8y agoIn my small, rural community, it was evident several years ago that the city wanted to shut down the library. They had obviously cut back on staff and had cut back hours. Likewise, we went through the same with recycling and trash, where there was a proposal to add $3/mo to the recycling bill to keep weekly service. The city instead cut back to every-other-week, with the option of paying $30/mo if you wanted a second bin (because families produce more recycling over a two-week period than one bin will allow). Once recycling costs increased and it was no longer a revenue-generator for the city to sell their waste to Chinese recyclers... guess what, the rates increased anyway. In short, I've found that small-town services boil down a lot to: 1) Who is willing to speak up for them. 2) Fervent anti-tax retirees who moved to those small towns thinking their costs and taxes would be less. 3) Poor, often corrupt governance. 4) A limited tax base to begin with. In many of these rural areas, there might be at most tens of thousands of residents.
- dgzl 8y ago> tens of thousands of residents I'm thinking tens to thousands of residents.
- poulsbohemian 8y agoTrue - I was being generous, realizing there are counties throughout the west with a few hundred, and there are others up to say 30,000 (roughly mine). There are differences, yet similarities across these that stand apart from say, Multnomah or King county.
- pteredactyl 8y agoClassic diversionary administrative state clickbait headline: "More taxes, because libraries!" How about why are our taxes not spent on libraries? What are they being spent on? The people who talk to the people who fill out the forms for the people who are supposed to be managing our libraries? Or was it that our libraries were actually sold by the people elected to supposedly make sure our libraries stayed open? Oops that was the US post office... Total government revenue was $6,300,000,000,000 last year[1] [1] https://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_2018USrt_20rs1n https://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_2018USrt_20rs1n
- rayiner 8y ago> In recent months, some communities voted to pay to reopen or support a town library, while others insisted that volunteers alone would suffice. In other news, voters in a democracy use their franchise to decide priorities for their community. Elitist Northeastern newspaper writes judgmental article about it because its editors have different priorities.
- tomohawk 8y agoIt's called firemen first. There's usually plenty of waste, especially in the more opaque and unaccountable areas of government, such as the school system administrative staff. So, they get rid of something people will really notice and guess what? Next time people will say they must have really needed that money.