The Price of Pestocrats

It’s too bad that gratuitous trouble makers get off free of charge in this world. If we could extract from them what they cost the rest of us, not only would it be easier to balance the books, but we’d probably hear less from them. And that alone would be a blessing. Pullman’s City Council is trying to decide how best to close a looming $87,000 budget shortfall in 2010. And that above and beyond the half a million dollars already cut. Will the city council impose a tax increase, or will it be more budget cuts? The aggravating truth is that, were it not for an infestation of Pestocrats, Pullman would probably be contemplating how to manage a cash surplus.

It’s been more than 4 years since Wal Mart was issued a conditional use permit to build a Supercenter on Bishop Boulevard on Pullman’s southern fringe. Immediately thereafter Pullman’s leftist fringe announced its opposition to the new storefront. For the next few years the ironically misnamed Pullman Alliance for Responsible Development (PARD) filed one frivolous appeal after another accomplishing nothing more than to postpone construction, deny Pullman millions of dollars in revenue, force Pullman residents to pay higher retail prices and expose themselves for the elitist snobs they really are.

Like former presidential frontrunner John Edwards, the PARDners opposition to Wal Mart arises primarily out of leftist elitism. The mega multimillionaire Edwards once boasted that his children would make fun of other children because their parents shopped at Wal Mart. Classy guy. A real man of the people. In their formal appeal, the PARDners listed among their objections to a Wal Mart their fear that a Wal Mart would attract “undesirable social elements” to Pullman. PARDners are like Hollywood liberals. They care oh so much about the lower income classes, as long as they stay in their own neighborhoods.

Economists estimate that having a Wal Mart in the neighborhood confers the equivalent of a $2000 per raise on the local residents. This might not mean much to overpaid PARDners, who buy their clothes from Chico’s and shop for organic groceries at the Moscow Food Coop. But for rest of us who have to stretch our dollars, having a Wal Mart or a Winco is much appreciated. And while Democrats attempt to cook up bureaucratic, big government solutions to providing low cost prescription drugs, Wal Mart offers its customers inexpensive solutions. And Wal Mart is able to offer its employees health insurance at a fraction of what Obamacare is projected to cost. We should learn from Wal Mart.

Thanks to their years-long histrionic exercise in left wing moral exhibitionism, Pullman lost out on millions of dollars in tax revenue that would have been pouring into the city’s treasury. And for indulging their vanity, the PARDners paid no price at all. It was the rest of us who have had to bear the cost for their narcissistic self-indulgence and it will be the rest of us who will now have to bear the brunt of the indirect costs associated with their economic obstructionism.

I’d like to think that we could dig into the liberals’ big bag of tricks and pull one out for our own use. Maybe we need something like a sin tax. A sin tax is a liberal tested, liberal approved boondoggle. It’s a tax designed to extract money from an unpopular segment of the population or the economy and is supposed to discourage disagreeable behavior.

Pestocrats don’t just have a lot of free time on their hands. They also seem have a lot of excess money or they would welcome a Wal Mart to Pullman. Why can’t we levy a tax on them? The precedent is established. We tax cigarettes because they supposedly increase health care costs. We have sin taxes on alcoholic beverages. Many states impose sin taxes on potato chips and soft drinks. Why not a tax on Pestocrats whose preferred form of self entertainment is to involve themselves in parasitic, posturing political activism that ends up draining vigor from the productive sector of the economy?

Yes, I know. Even pests are entitled to petition their government. But if we can’t actually tax pests for their nuisance value, perhaps we could keep a running tally of what their meddling actually costs. I think they’d lose a lot of popularity, even among their own fans.