Tonight at 5 pm, a public hearing was held in front of the Erie County Legislature to solicit opinions on the proposed County budget for 2007. The legislature’s chamber was packed with a standing room only crowd. I stayed for nearly 3 hours and heard over 50 people speak. Each person was given 3 minutes maximum to voice their thoughts. A good job was done to keep the speakers moving along, but it was still a long, tedious process.

My overall impression was one of disgust. All but two of the speakers were there to advocate more spending for cultural institutions. The library system was responsible for the most people seeking taxpayers’ money. It appeared that most of the people seeking funding directly benefited from the government handouts as employees of the organizations they represented. Some of the funding requests were downright bizarre, including a request for funding for feral cats.

The people with their hands out did not seem to realize the County’s finances are bleak and money is tight. They also seemed to have no concern for the fact that we are severely overtaxed, causing businesses and people to relocate to other areas of the country. Most of the pleas for money were based on fallacies, emotion, and rhetoric. One gentleman tried to imply that failure to fund the culturals adequately would result in “all our young people being placed in prisons.” Others tried to make a case claiming that the cultural institutions create wealth for the area. The truth of the matter is that when you add up all the local, state and federal funding these groups receive, there is no way wealth is created.

James Ostrowski pointed out that one cultural institution was severely underrepresented, the family units of Erie County struggling to pay their own bills. Many families can not afford to attend these cultural institutions, such as Shea’s, the Buffalo Philharmonic, Studio Arena and many others. The cost of admission is beyond their reach. Yet, they are forced to hand over their hard earned money, money that is needed at home, to fund these organizations that are loaded with jobs paying far above what the average worker makes. Ostrowski noted that the legislators frequently blame the County’s financial condition on mandates from the State. He also noted that most of the legislators supported the State politicians who created the mandates and also accepted money from them for their own political campaigns.

The pro-library funding crowd doesn’t seem to comprehend that the population has declined and the tax base can’t and shouldn’t support that same number of libraries we used to have. What these groups fail to do is come up with solutions that are more realistic. They need to think out of the box and look at options like merging all libraries, or most, into the schools. That would put the resources within better reach for students and eliminate building and maintenance costs. I suspect the “supporters” of the libraries wouldn’t like that because it would lead to a reduction in jobs.

Government workers comprise 17% of our workforce in Erie County. In many ways the plush jobs at the cultural institutions, and many non-profits, are just an extension of government employment that is not counted in the 17% statistic. When you add the actual number ofgovernment workers to the cultural and non-profit workers and compare that to the average voter turnout, it is easy to see why we are in a financial mess currently.

Until taxpayers start becoming more vocal and demanding change, we might as well get used to being overtaxed in a shrinking economy.

Before anyone thinks I am against cultural institutions, I am not. I am against money being taken in the form of taxes to subsidize nonessential services and projects. I am for freedom. Freedom means much less government with a corresponding reduction in taxes. The result is more money in the pockets of the people who earned the money. Freedom means having the money necessary to voluntarily support cultural organizations. Freedom means you are able to make the determination which groups deserve your support. Freedom means not diluting the value of your dollar and the product of your work to pay bureaucracies to decide how to spend your money. Freedom means the cultural institutions doing the best job will flourish and the questionable ones will fail. Currently many questionable groups are funded because politicians want their support and don’t want to offend anyone by turning down their requests. We can not afford that kind of lavish, self-serving spending anymore.

Will it be easy slashing the size of government and slashing funding to the culturals? No, of course not. There will be pain endured along the way. What you need to look at is the end result. We will be much better off! Nothing in life is free and that is especially true of a large government.