An Elitist Idea Worthy of Withering Public Condemnation
So the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com want us to dream big. They want us to embrace their “big idea” of a regional sales tax to pay for sports stadiums and a refurbished airport. And if we don’t agree with them and don’t just love their idea, well, they think we are de facto losers.
Many who live here Northeast Ohio are getting just a little bit tired of being chastised by breathless, bloviating local civic boosters when we won’t wildly support their neoliberal “economic development” schemes that primarily benefit regional elites and fat cat oligarchs. We’ve all witnessed closely and firsthand here in Northeast Ohio the cosmic lie that “trickle down” economics actually is. It’s a vile scam that enriches top income earners and holders of immense wealth, and that’s it. The only thing that trickles down is overwhelming contempt for average people, which underlies this tone-deaf proposal to tax everyone regionally to enrich and coddle regional elites.
Dream big? Embrace bold ideas? Okay, let’s do that.
Truly bold ideas that would likely garner immense public support but are yet to be offered by civic “leaders” in Northeast Ohio are addressing endemic poverty, providing affordable housing for the middle class and poor people, properly funding urban public schools, promoting community wealth-building as opposed to rapacious investor economic extraction, ending the misery of the unhoused, rapidly restoring the tree canopy to protect a vulnerable urban population that has been ignored and discriminated against, fixing systemic racism in our local healthcare system leading to disastrous health outcomes for people of color, providing relief from skyrocketing real estate taxes to the elderly wishing to remain in their homes, reducing disproportionate infant and maternal death rates for people of color, building up an anemic public transit system that underserves low income people, encouraging the non-profit industrial complex to better serve its host neighborhoods and public schools, providing more living wage, family sustaining jobs, implementing community based anti-racist policing…you know, stuff like that.
But the PD and Cleveland.com focus on catering to the billionaire-owned sports franchises and glitzing up an airport that preferentially serves the regional elite. These may be high priorities for the region’s elites, but they are not high priorities for most taxpayers and voters.
And stunningly, they look to a regressive regional sales tax to fund the scheme, so that low and middle income people get the pleasure of paying a larger share of their income than the wealthy to build fancy sports palaces and a swank airport they can’t afford to use.
No wonder Cleveland proper has so dramatically lost population and remains one of the poorest big cities in the United States. Our civic “leaders” do their absolute best to routinely transfer more wealth up to the already wealthy. “Public private partnership” has come to mean that public money is used to grow private fortunes.
People in the area don’t warmly embrace certain “bold ideas” from our civic “leaders” because the ideas themselves are morally deficient at their core and selectively serve the interests of the region’s posh, powerful and privileged.
It’s about time we hear some bold ideas for regional changes that actually help the people that live here struggling to just make a living, make ends meet or get the slightest bit ahead. Those are ideas regional voters and taxpayers could enthusiastically get behind.
