Voting and Funding Issues

The Proposal

     ~The Proposal was this: eligibility to vote for school budgets shall be limited to those who pay the school property taxes from which the budget is funded. Members of the school board must also be property tax payers lest they proselytize among the citizenry and studentry to the disadvantage of the taxpayer. Further, eligibility to vote for prospective school board members shall be limited to those who pay school taxes. That's it.

     The proposed method was this: payment of property taxes shall be recorded with a receipt made out to one person, an actual person, that person being the property tax payer, by name. A section of this tax receipt shall be a voter registration certificate made out to the same name. No person shall be issued more than one registration certificate even if they own multiple parcels taxed separately. No voter registration certificate may be transferred to, or used by, a person other than the one named. The principle is simple: one school tax payer, one vote.

      #"But, but,"  "we renters pay property taxes, albeit indirectly, and our children are as affected as any others by school budgets."

      ~ "Indirectly doesn't count. Shall your employer also be eligible to vote, however distant he may be, he being the source of your income, and by extension his customers and stockholders as well? If you move to another town

the day after you vote shall we subtract your vote from the tally? As for your children, they shall take the schools as they find them, as do all the children in the district, all are receiving the same schooling even if at no cost to their parents. No dear renter, with no skin in the game you are a consumer of the worst sort, the invoice goes to others so you insist the deluxe options alone are sufficient."

       "The property tax payer is mandated to extend himself beyond reason and yet you still cite imagined inadequacies,"     "You judge spending proposals not in comparison to the available means but in comparison to an ideal, and therefore your favored expenditures are without upper limit. You believe yourself free to conflate wants with needs, and worse, even in the absence of your material support you imagine your presumed happy endings to be on higher moral ground as well, so you characterize dissent as base and despicable, and so it shall always be when your part goes no further than to consume that which others are compelled to set before you."

      "You are fond of the term 'fully funded'. A school is fully funded when those providing the funds say it is fully funded, not when the recipient or bystanders say it is." 

     #"Anyone old enough to fight and die for his country certainly should be eligible to vote on school budgets," Nothing's too good for our boys. They talked of youthful faces prematurely aged and grim from defending hearth and home from horrors too awful to name.  We shall not exclude them from this comparatively trivial affair of the home front. 

        old war posters with slogans in sans serif bold about never forgetting and buying bonds to the threshold of penury and turning in used cooking oils as an act of selfless patriotism. The illustrations featured determined, ultra-fit young men in sharply creased uniforms marching under bluebird skies and billowing pennants. Others depicted cigar-chomping GIs in outright sartorial distress, and in need of an emergency shave, plunging bayonets into the chests of the enemy at less agreeable venues. "Those posters once hung on classroom walls," 

           ~"there's no Zero Tolerance in times of actual peril." 

       "Setting aside the fact that neither the school nor the township are authorized to declare war, or noticeably inclined to do so, much less empowered to send anyone off to combat or conclude a peace treaty, it's enough that any young person who pays school taxes is qualified to vote, even if unwilling or unfit for military service."

          "a moment's thought reveals potential enlistees are not in fact veterans, nor are they likely to be. Yet some of the school tax payers among us are veterans—many with no children. Where is the equity in this?"

     "Shall we continue to let those who do not pay decide what funding shall be provided by those who are compelled to pay? What reason may be thought too slight to warrant increased funds when those funds are provided by others? Is it not enough that all benefit alike, those who pay and those who do not? How is it those who do not pay shall decide how much less of our earnings we may keep when already we provide their children's schooling at no cost to them? Is this not injustice enough?"

          "Shall they also decide the cafeteria menu or disallow squirrel guns during season?," 

wp report

I have stripped/edited out the story to just the bare bones. 

If you ask I may consider putting links to this,,, I first want you to think on it.