Starting Today

Hi everyone,

    Today, I am starting a new blog called Fox Cities Progressive because I hope to start a conversation about the progressive tradition of the Fox cities and how we can best continue it into the future. For many years, our community has been a progressive one, although we don't always think about it that way. We like to think of ourselves as conservatives, and we like to think of our community as a conservative one, but we have always been progressive when it comes to providing ourselves with first-rate public services.  We have some of the best schools in the country; we have a fine technical college that draws students from all over the United States and from other countries; we have a fine system of parks.

    Recently however, we seem to have forgotten how important all these things are to our community.  In our public dialogue, we seem to focus mostly on ways to reduce our taxes.  In our public dialogue, local government expenditures seem to be thought of mainly as waste, and if they are waste, we should of course reduce them as much as possible.  But we have to remember that in government as in other areas, you get what you pay for, and we have to remember that if we want to have first-rate public services, we have to pay for them and we have to maintain them.  Minimizing taxes cannot be a goal.  Reasonable taxes can be a goal, and we can attain that goal if we think about taxes and services together.  We have to think about the kinds of services that we want and about the amount we are willing to pay for them.  We know this in our own lives.  We rarely ask ourselves how we can minimize our cost for transportation.  Instead we ask ourselves what kinds of cars we want and how much we are willing to pay for them, and we buy the best cars we can afford.  So with public services.  We have to think about what we want and what we can afford, and we have to do it in a broad context that includes trade-offs.  For example, we can ask ourselves whether we want to improve funding for our schools or whether we prefer to expand our prisons.  We can ask ourselves whether we really want to reduce our property taxes if doing so will prevent us from maintaining our roads and bridges.

     Many conservatives would like us would like us to think about taxes by themselves, and in that context reducing taxes always seems like a good thing, but progressives know that we cannot think about taxes without also thinking about the services that they pay for.  I hope that this blog will provide a place for discussion, and I invite you all to participate.