The downtown mafia doesn't disappoint. They handed a new script to our self-absorbed, incompetent mayor and he ran with it. Yes, Mayor Greg Ballard teases the public with a press release saying he had a big announcement today to make on public safety. Instead, one of the tax increases already on the table for consideration for hiring additional police officers that the last 65% increase in the local income tax failed to produce seven years ago is now being proposed to be uses for a five-year, $25 million preschool program for children who come from lower income families. Education is not the responsibility of the consolidated city-county government, but this mayor will now raise your taxes to spend money that should be paid out of existing school budgets, such as the Indianapolis Public Schools, which we recently learned had a budget surplus of $8.4 million after falsely telling the public it had a $30 million deficit.
Mayor Ballard is proposing using additional money raised through the elimination of the homestead property tax credit, which will net the City about $7 million a year, on his preschool initiative. Ballard plans to turn that $5 million a year over to the unelected board of the United Way of Central Indiana, which the downtown mafia has been rest assured will deliver grant money to the education profiteers who are popping up all over the state and who are dumping big-time money in the campaign committees of corrupt pols like Mayor Greg Ballard. That money will be used to match nearly $25 million in federal and state money Gov. Mike Pence recently announced he would make available to Marion County for his preschool pilot program for children in low-income families.
Perhaps spending more money on preschool education is a swell idea, but it's not the responsibility of City-County government. I realize Mayor Ballard wants to create new programs and hand out money to campaign contributors for his re-election bid, but if Gov. Pence's Path to Quality program is worthwhile, then the school districts to whom we're paying precious property tax dollars every year should be funding it. They're not part of the equation because the education profiteers would be shut out, and that's what this is really all about. Ballard is already wasting millions of our tax dollars a year administering charter schools his office has approved for the benefit of his various campaign contributors, which under state law the City is entitled and should be assessing on the education profiteers. Now he wants to give away $5 million a year in new taxes and spending to an organization run by people who are not in any way accountable to the public or even representative of the taxpayers of Indianapolis.
Meanwhile, the Marion County Income Tax Council began deliberations last night on plans to raise your income taxes at least another $25 to $30 million a year supposedly to hire additional police officers on top of the $7 million a year they plan to raise through the elimination of the homestead property tax credit. That of course is a total lie because we know the downtown mafia's new criminal justice center to be built, operated and maintained by a foreign consortium starting next year will cost city-county taxpayers most of the promised new revenues in new annual outlays, leaving no additional revenues in the long-run to support hiring the 100, 200 or 300 new police officers these irresponsible public officials speak of funding on any given day with yet another tax increase as yet another diversion from their true motives for getting their hands on more of your tax dollars.
This is the only place you will get straight talk on what's really going on with your public finances. The management of the Indianapolis Star, the Indianapolis Business Journal and each of the local TV stations in town are all in bed with the downtown mafia on these bait-and-switch, shell game schemes to launder more of your tax dollars into the self-serving purposes of the ruling elite who could give a damn less about you or your children's station in life. They will feed you nothing but propaganda about these proposals and will silence anyone with a dissenting viewpoint. Wake up, people.
UPDATE: A reader points out that Ballard's plan is a retread of an idea first tossed out during the last mayoral election by his Democratic opponent, Melina Kennedy, to repurpose Rebuild Indy money to fund grants for early childhood education.
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