More Taxes Mean Tax Relief

Since The Washington Post is unlikely to publishing the following letter to the editor, I heareby offer it to you, dear readers:


Dear Mr. MacMillan [The Washington Post writer]:

Your recent story, “Alexandria to Tax Cell Phones as Other Revenue Drops” (16 June 2005) is grossly inaccurate. You write, “The City Council approved a new tax on cell phones as part of the fiscal 2006 budget. It will help make up some of the money that the city will lose after the real estate tax rate was lowered in order to provide relief to homeowners.”

Please allow me to disabuse you of the idea that Alexandria has lost any revenue from any source whatsoever. Real estate property taxes are going up this year and have gone up every past year that I can remember. Yes, the property tax rate is going down. But the actual amount of tax dollars (i.e., “taxes”) being paid by each property owner will go up because of increases in assessments. Furthermore, the amount of tax dollars that the city will receive from real estate taxes will increase significantly. Consequently, I am quite baffled as to where you get the idea that the city “will lose” any money.

Unfortunately, you allow yourself to be co-opted by slick politicians who want to create the illusion that they have reduced taxes. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is currently a column on your web site by Howard Kurtz titled, “Backlash on the Left” in which he describes how the mainstream media has kowtowed to the Bush administration by failing to publish hard hitting stories about their mistakes. You, too, seem to be part of this problem.

You fall into this same syndrome when you buy into the local politicians’ scams in which they pretend that they are lowering taxes when, in fact, they are clearly raising them. If there is any doubt in your mind about the reality of these tax increases, I will be quite glad to send you copies of my Alexandria real estate bills for the past twenty-seven years. Let me assure you that they have risen every single year.

I would suggest that a better opening for your story would have been, “The city of Alexandria is creating a new tax on cell phones in order to meet its insatiable thirst for tax revenue. The recent increase in real estate tax revenue has proved insufficient to cover all of the city’s spending plans and therefore still more tax money is needed.”


JBY