I picked up my copy of the Tribune today and there it was, above the fold, "E.V. Gains with ASU’s Growth," "University expected to add $4 Billion yearly to local economy." The additions of ASU’s Polytechnic campus as well as such projects as the new River View Project are the direction we need to go. It is a direction we should have been going long ago. There are two schools of thought when it comes to a city in financial crisis, one you can raise taxes to increase revenue. We saw how that was received by an already overburdened citizenry. The second is that you can look to the future and stimulate growth through investing in money making projects. As an admitted conservative I tend to like the second option better.Sure, we could have had a property tax, given the money to our government and trusted that they should spend it properly, but what if they didn’t? What if at the end of this tax dollar money grab we had nothing to show for it? When you stimulate business growth in an area, and I am not talking about putting a check cashing store on every corner, you have something left over at the end, a business, an actual physical location that generates money. It even gets better; it creates jobs which create tax payers which create tax revenues, everybody wins. It is a trickle down process which poises us to sustain life in the future. Tax increases are like putting a butterfly bandage on a hemorrhaging wound, it might stop a little of the bleeding and you can say that you tried but the patient will die in the end. Investing in sustainable growth and encouraging business to flourish is the right antidote for a city in crisis.What we need to do is to bring this city into the future, make it a place where business wants to be, where people want to shop and go to school. What we don’t need is to throw up our hands and scare people away by saying if you move here we are going to solve all our problems by taking more of you hard earned money in the form of taxes. If you’re short on cash and can’t pay them then you can visit one of our many pawn shops or lounge in the air-conditioned comfort of a check cashing store, if one isn’t on your corner, it will be shortly, give me a break…
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