Not content with rigging an election to deprive local taxpayers of $1.2 billion, Richland County, S.C. leaders are now plotting to raise taxes on library users. In fact they are reportedly conducting phone polls in an effort to gauge community support for the idea.
Sources say the poll – conducted this week – asked respondents if they would vote in an election on a new bond referendum in Richland County, then proceeded to launch into “propaganda about improving the Richland County library system.”
One of the ideas mentioned was a new $2 monthly addition to the property tax bill of county residents.
Good grief …
For starters, libraries are not core functions of government. In the age of the internet, they are also becoming increasingly irrelevant. Accordingly, spending tax dollars to improve them is a total waste of money.
More importantly, if local governments keep nickel and diming citizens like this … citizens will soon have no nickels or dimes left, at which point having nice libraries will be of little consolation.
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Follow the money. Who serves to benefit most from this tax increase? A construction company currently in bankruptcy court? Can you say bailout?
The mayor? The City Manager? Sen. Jackson. Oh. This was a retorical question. Sorry. Nevermind.
Libraries are used by a lot of people, especially those who are in school or college, but plenty of others as well. A lot of people use their local libraries to access the internet. In rural communities, libraries often serve as public access to (somewhat) high speed internet when such access is otherwise more difficult to come by. As long as the library is running at its utmost efficiency when it comes to finances, they should be fairly inexpensive, especially compared to the “core functions” of government.
And no, local governments have run public libraries for decades upon decades without bankrupting citizens.
“In the age of the internet, they are also becoming increasingly irrelevant” this may be the single stupidest thing ever said by anyone, in any place, era, epoch or eon, since the invention of writing, speech or pointing and grunting.
FITS forgets.There are some people who still read books! I do 2 a week,at least.
Ain’t many books at that thare library! Bin thare lately? DVDs an’ CDs a plentie– even pop culture (sic) an’ romance novels, but not much in da way ov edumadicational material.
By all means, let’s spend more money so the homeless will have a better place to hang out during the day. Have you been to the main branch on Assembly Street lately?
I miss the one who used to post here. There’s some talent amongst those bibliobums.
Libraries are a core function of government, who else will build and fund them. We don’t have Carnegie types any more that have a sense of civic obligation, especially those people who you pander to FITS. So let’s make libraries pay as you go so only the wealthy will be able to get books but of course they can afford to purchase their own. It would be a cold, hard world if we truly lived the FITS world vision.
That sounds like a great idea. At least a token charge. Cap it at a couple of bucks a month if you check out lots of books. At least give people the chance, no matter how poor, to feel as if they are participating and putting something in the pot. It just might become habit forming.
Putting something in the pot. Gimme a break, do you honestly think that with all the taxes we pay, on wages, income, purchases (sales tax and alcohol/tobacco, etc.) that someone actually goes through life paying no taxes at all? How many people don’t own either a home OR a car OR a boat, all of which pay property taxes directly. Even renters pay it indirectly (and at a higher rate).
I loathe responding to the likes of you. I assume you have analyzed the welfare state a great success. Fat negroes will line up for handouts and to vote. We know that.
I loathe responding to bigots like yourself. Maybe if you had spent more time in a library, you would rise above your ignorance and hatred. If nothing else maybe you would know that more whites are on welfare than blacks.
If you and your ilk made sure that corporations and the wealth paid as much in taxes (as a percentage of their income) as the middle class, we wouldn’t have a deficit.
BTW, I don’t support raising taxes for the RCPL in THIS instance. It is a luxury at a time when other (sales) taxes have just been raised for other things. But to insist (as FITS and another nut jobs do) that libraries are not a proper function for government funding, is beyond stupid.
I’m no bigot. Love the decent, responsible individual; loathe and despise the rotten, victim-centric culture, and those who perpetuate it. Your kool-aid is ready.
Yes, I could tell by your use of the words ‘fat negro’ that you love all people and don’t judge people by their physical characteristics. Too bad it isn’t still the 1950’s, and you could have just typed the N word that you really meant.
I guess if using a free library card makes someone a parasite of the government, then that explains why you have never been inside one. It also explains your intellect.
I have to admit I’m a bigot.
I like having sex with women that aren’t fat for example.
Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit.
Except the biggest beneficiaries of them are children.
Notice the proposed tax has nothing to do with whether you use the library or not. The “fairest” form of tax would at least be one based on user fees if it’s going to exist. Like a tax on those getting library cards….but we all know that’s not raising any substantial amount of money.
The proposal is a perfect representation of gov’t as a whole.
If you do away with public libraries, where will the homeless go to use the restroom?
Maybe they plan on using some of the millions to build separate bathrooms for the homeless? I would vote for that.
They can hold an annual Olympic Crab Jumping and Bedbug Toss, charge tickets, and buy some more ‘urban’ soft-core porno ‘lit.’ Advancing civilization, one trashy midnight love quiet storm novel at a time.
Isn’t that what they’re doing on Bull Street?
They’ve been a function of government since at least 2000 BC. They aren’t even a core function of government, they are a core function of civilization.
Also libraries aren’t just places where we keep books, librarians are essentially paid research assistants. We’ve been doing that since before, I dunno, Eratosthenes.
As far as taxing it, that is up to Richland county, but writing off libraries is kind of a short sighted view. We need shared common knowledge that is (hopefully) in a hard copy backup format that isn’t easily alterable and available to everyone.
“They aren’t even a core function of government, they are a core function of civilization.”
Hear! Hear!
Another elite, pretending to care about the “masses.”
Certainly not a polymath we have here.
One of those would read and understand better.
You keep saying that. I don’t think you know what a “polymath” is. Or is your erudition overestimating your intellect?
Too funny. You project.
What next? Will you start posting in fake scholarly Latin?
Silly rabbit.. I already post in Latin, and have since 1971. Is it fake? Well, you’d have to ask my post-graduate Latin Professor at Wycliffe. YOU used the term, “polymath,” in the negative, which shows just how wrong you are. I was merely responding. Are you often this wrong about what you write?
Read your Aristophanes. Half the population of Athens did not even attend the library. He made fun of that in both The Clouds and The Frogs. Only the wealthy showed up and that was to read their own writings. As for Eratosthenes, he was fabulously wealthy, your basic politician, and did not believe in taxes. His reasoning was that, if only the rich provided for the public weal, then only the rich could be the ones who set the laws.
Once again, FITS fails to mention that his sugar daddies, The Quinns, are behind the tax increase…
Are they wanting to add beds for all the homeless that live there during the day?
Hey, were else are the homeless people in Columbia going to go?
And you complain about SC being last in education?
I don’t complain. Public education, as we have it in S.C., is the very best Moderates and Progressives can come up with. I find them marvelous object lessons.
My family’s late fines alone should have paid for a new wing by now.
When will it stop? We had the penny sales tax increase. I just read where Columbia is going to raise the water rates. Taxpayers are going to help pay for Bull Street project. No new taxes!! Let the homeless sleep somewhere else!
Another $24 dollars a year for each property owner?? We already pay a library tax. How much is that, by the way? What has changed that they need to raise more money? Are they building new libraries? Let’s see a breakdown and justification before they start taking more…
The modern library serves no meaningful function, unless you consider a place for winos and pedophiles to hang out, meaningful function. The children of the “poor” already have free access to the internet. The best books are free on the internet, especially all the classics. The best hardbound books are not in public libraries or they would have already been stolen – they are in College Libraries. If you don’t believe me, try finding a scholarly book on Ky?gen in a public library. Anyway, it’s on the internet. A library is another 18th & 19th century dinosaur idea, like Keynesian economics.
What is even more ridiculous is that the majority of people arguing for a library haven’t even read the great ideas contained in them.
You are ignoring the drawbacks of what we are replacing it with. The dead tree repository isn’t as easily switched off, modified, filtered or censored. But whatever, you win; the economics of it have already spoken.
Have a little faith in capitalism. If there is a buck in it, someone will find a way to make it work for as many as can afford it. If people make Shakespeare more important than computers, then they will get Shakespeare, in a hundred different forms, getting ever cheaper, every year. Maybe it will even create jobs for those who want them. But remember, we have along way to crawl out of the living hell the last two administrations have at first, allowed, and then, encouraged.
Only a person of very limited and possibly shallow interests would think that even merely a majority of what is worthwhile to read is available on the internet. And even then, much of that is expensive to obtain, ~$40 per article for most that I see.
I am so tired of doing you people’s research for you, but then, you remind me so much of the students who don’t make high enough grades to survive in my classes. Take your soft sigh and hoof it over to the University of Virginia electronic library site. There you will find such shallow interests as Ancient Greek Theatre, Mark Twain, Boris Pasternak. Then, maybe you can drag yourself over to any one of seventeen University websites where you can discover arguments over whether Einstein was right about the constancy of the speed of light. You might want to wade in a little bit at a time in the shallow end of the pool as you seem to be driven more by search engines than actual research. Why waste money on those articles when you can find them for free with a little work.
So, don’t get snotty with me. I fart better ideas than you think all month long.
The people whining about library’s are the same ones that would have had government subsidizing buggy whips well into the 20th century.
They just took the “county” of their name. I say they can do without the “countys” MONEY then! How much of our money did they waste on that name change?
Missing the bigger picture.. Where i do not have much use for a library, plenty do.. However If richland county is trying to add a tax to support the library it just simply means.. They want to bring in more money in another way so they can cut that same amount back out of the other end of the budget to give it to some other function we can live without.. I wouldnt be half way surprised it we end up seeing an increase on the bus systems budget.. If we were to actually look at the budget and see an extra say (Example $$’s here) $100 additional in the budget for the library brought in by the tax they want to add we will likely see the county supplying $100 less out of general funds to the library.. and likely see that same $100 or divisions of it in other budgets probably for other things we voted down in the past that shouldnt be supported by tax dollars..
Just like the bus tax they ran for several years… Bus service couldnt survive with out it.. but they got a brand new facility they asked for and got shot down on before that tax.. So they got the bus tax (what i call the lets get the bus maintenance facility away from columbia because we have plans for that lot tax)… oh yeah its still an eyesore of a vacant lot a decade later.. just like Kline iron and steel columbia ran off.. Mark my words that money is NOT for the library.. its just to support a hole in that budget that will magically appear once they get that tax approved. Dont drink the cool aid people.. Its a bait and switch act.. A standard Richland M.O.