Publisher’s Positions
Tax And Spend City Mayor
Indya Kincannon, mayor of Knoxville, has announced another half-penny increase on the sales tax inside the City of Knoxville. Kincannon is proposing to let the voters decide in a referendum this November. There are those of us cynical enough to believe Kincannon has waited to place the referendum on the ballot in the off-year when voters inside the city will only be voting on city council races instead of a presidential election, as they did last year.
Kincannon and the city council have already raised the property tax by 40% a few years ago. Knox County, which operates the school system and every other amenity or service except for police, fire protection and garbage pickup inside the city limits, last raised property taxes more than twenty years ago. The county government spends twice what the city does, and all the funds going toward the school system from local, state and federal taxes make it a billion-dollar enterprise. Indya makes the statement, “It is no secret that more people are moving here, the number of visitors is skyrocketing, and our infrastructure is being pushed to its limits.”
That statement begs some very important and pertinent questions, the first of which is: Do the people of Knoxville and Knox County have to continue to build apartments and houses for everyone who wants to move here? Or is it possible some of them might live in Jefferson, Loudon, or Union counties? Even those not too swift on the uptake realize the traffic and congestion here is FAR worse than it was two years ago. The notion that we must continue building until everyone who wishes to move here is housed is nothing less than foolish. Kincannon and many county leaders are right inasmuch as our infrastructure has been stretched by those moving into Knoxville and Knox County. Just why we would want to speed up the pace of development to house anybody and everybody has never been explained. The only green spaces inside the city will be those where they have spent a couple of million dollars on something they claim is art, even if it looks like a mushroom sliding off a plate. Folks should ponder the question that the daily newspaper never questions a penny of how the city government spends its money, and how it constantly needs more to spend.
Clearly, if we keep building it they will come. The city has one pedestrian bridge leading from South Knoxville to downtown, not by design but rather because it needs to be repaired. The city government is falling all over itself to build a bridge for the University of Tennessee, supposedly for students to walk across, after having removed something like $9 million of taxable property from the tax rolls. It is surely a coincidence that the same bridge would allow those folks to disembark from their yachts and big boats to Neyland Stadium on game days.
Both the city and county governments need to be thinking about the quality of life for the people living here now, not those who might wish to come here. As to those visiting, there seem to be plenty of hotels and motels to accommodate them. The City of Knoxville doesn’t need to tax people out of their homes in order to build more apartments, or if so, be honest about it. Nor does Knox County need to be one big cookie-cutter subdivision.
Keeping up our roads, parks, schools, and the like does indeed require money and repairing our existing infrastructure, but unlike Knox County, the City of Knoxville clearly has a spending problem, but don’t expect to read that in the pages of the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Just how does a government offering so few services continue to need more and more money to spend? For one thing, the salaries paid to public employees inside the city are larger than those paid to similar employees in the county government who render most of the services. Most county employees have a 401K retirement account rather than a lifetime pension that enjoys regular cost-of-living increases. Out of the last two property tax increases inside the city, the first was largely to keep the pensions solvent. The very notion that an employee or someone in public office should be able to assign pension rights to a child is absurd and just plain wrong.
Legacy Media Has No Credibility
With every passing day it becomes clearer and clearer that the mainstream news media either looked the other way or just plain lied about the mental condition of Joe Biden. When Biden blurted out one day that he, like millions of other Americans, had cancer, many of us – including me – thought it was another of his inexplicable out-there comments.
Now it looks as if it was the truth. Numerous medical experts believe that Biden’s unfortunate prostate cancer didn’t develop within the last few days, but rather over the last several years. Jake Tapper, who played his role in trying to gaslight the American people before trying to turn a buck by revealing how the Biden White House attempted to cover up Biden’s decline, has written that aides were talking about putting Biden in a wheelchair after the 2024 election if he won a second term.
Media and news outlets that deliberately mislead or lie ruin their own credibility. They should know that trust takes a long time to earn, but can evaporate in a second. There is a good reason why polls show the media is less popular with the public than Congress. They did it the old-fashioned way: they earned it.
