Letter to the Editor,
I am writing to respond to Mr. Dondley’s Letter to the Editor that appeared in Tuesday’s edition.
Mr. Dondley’s well-written letter contains smoothly embedded
socioeconomic profiling and uses Early Socialistic analogies to make his points.
First, just because someone is a lawyer, doesn’t mean they are richer than “blue collar” folks. Many lawyers are unemployed, under-employed, or earning less than a “blue collar” worker makes. Many blue collar workers do quite well, did not have to pay for a college degree (or two) in order to qualify for their job, do not have massive college loan debts, and receive extraordinary benefits. Some of the highest income folks in Westfield do not have law degrees, and in fact many are blue collar workers who run healthy small companies or work for
the government where the get great work hours and benefits. Some do both. Mr. Dondley seems to be trying to jump on the “screw the one-percenters” bandwagon.
Second, his nice little story is that Mr. Rich Lawyer voluntarily offers to pick up a portion of everyone else’s bill. This is not the way the tax shift system works. A more appropriate analogy would be the five random people sat at Mr. Lawyer’s table and said “you look rich, so we took a vote and the majority of us decided that we’d each get a $2 discount and you’d pay the $10 difference”. Mr. Lawyer replies “I didn’t get a vote, and even if I did, I’m obviously outnumbered by people who want to pay less or get something for free”. In the real
world, if Mr. Lawyer wanted to help the community, and had the
financial wherewithal, he’d probably donate to a charity, sponsor an event or team, create a scholarship program, etc… – he wouldn’t write a check to the city to offset the property taxes of “blue collar” workers.
Further discounting his analogy, the level of service received while dining is not the same for Mr. Lawyer and his five “guests”. Mr. Lawyer has to clear his own place and wash his own dishes (much like business owners have to pay for their trash removal) and he has to pay to filter his own water (much like business owners have to pay for in-ground stormwater treatment and also pay a city stormwater fee).
Finally, Mr. Dondley talks about “small potatoes” – again a nice smooth way to imply that “those nasty rich business owners can afford to pay”. He’s leaving out a few things: that a business owner may have a $1 million building, but she might have a $900,000 mortgage on it; she might have drained her retirement account and secured a bank loan with her home to fund the business; she might be taking no salary in order to get the business up-and-running; she may be paying a fortune
in taxes already (property taxes, excise taxes, payroll taxes, social security taxes, fuel taxes, etc…); and, maybe she’s actually employing some of those “blue collar” workers, and paying for large portions of their benefits and taxes. Those employees might also be her customers who don’t want to see their prices rise. Or even worse, maybe those employees buy from Walmart because the prices are lower – that’s more like reality.
If you attended the recent City Council meeting you would have heard from an executive at Columbia Manufacturing. They’ve been in business a long time and own a large commercial property in Westfield. He explained that contrary to the opinion that “business owners can just raise their prices”, that in his world even a price change of 5 cents can cause them to lose business. He told a story about losing a school furniture order over 5 cents per chair – that’s how competitive the world is these days. If his taxes go up, and he tries to pass along the increase, he may loses customers and orders, and he might have to lay-off “blue collar” workers.
Along the same lines, if you followed the Prolamina structured tax debate, you would have heard that Prolamina was considering closing down the Westfield facility (affecting 250 workers) over property taxes that represented 5/100ths of 1 percent of revenue. The mayor, and a majority of councilors, supported that $600,000 tax break.
Remember, businesses are legal entities – not real beings. Businesses are owned by people, employ people, and deliver goods and services to people. Ultimately, individual people pay one way or the other. If a business’s operating costs rise, it has to find a way to pass along the costs to its customers – individual taxpayers like you.
I haven’t decided how I’m going to vote on the shift, but I do know it’s a lot more complicated than picking up a $2 lunch bill. I am concerned about seniors and other fixed-income individuals, struggling families, and small business owners, and I know that the much more important issues, for all taxpayers, are government spending and the massive snowballing government debts and obligations that we are passing on to the future generations of taxpayers. I hope that both residential and business taxpayers can work together to reduce government spending and taxes for everyone.
Sincerely,
Dave Flaherty
City Councilor
