Star Editors Once Again Pining For Mass Transit

Another day and another editorial by the Star's editors telling us that they know what's best for us: higher taxes for a metropolitan mass transit system that is designed to line the pockets of the pay-to-play contractors--the only voices the editors seem to listen to these days. Perhaps that's because the Star's top local executive, Karen Crotchfelt, sits on the board of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, a nonprofit funded with taxpayer dollars that is behind much of the corporate welfare and self-dealing that permeates government in Central Indiana. As far as the CICP is concerned, it is a role of government to be the sole arbiter of winner and losers.

The editors have nothing but laudatory words for the House because it passed the mass transit legislation, and it's now setting its sights on the Indiana Senate against which it is launching a verbal offensive. It blames Senate President Sen. David Long and Sen. Luke Kenley for "two years of frustrating obstructionism" to pressure them into jumping aboard their self-dealing scheming. According to the editors, everyone who matters supports their mass transit plan--"local public officials, social services providers, clergy and House members across the public spectrum." What they don't tell you is the payoffs that are taking place to get that support. Even IndyCAN, the so-called clergy backing the legislation, got a big payoff from a local charitable group controlled by lobbyists for the mass transit, to use their churches for lobbying purposes. If you belong to a local Catholic church, you may want to tell your priest to focus on ministering to the faithful and to keep his nose out of government taxing and spending matters since a number of local parish priests seem to think that lobbying for mass transit is part of their ministerial duties.

To assuage concerns that metropolitan mass transit is going to turn into another boondoggle, the editors tell us that the rail segment "is not locked into the plans." Uh, the only people who get to decide that matter are the unelected, unaccountable board members handpicked by the pay-to-play contractors who are are already divvying up he contracts for this multi-billion dollar public works project. Once the law is in place and the taxes are in place, the unelected board can do what it damn well pleases with out taxpayer dollars and the people will have no voice in the matter no matter how much is may cost. If they make decisions that force future tax increases, which occurs with virtually every major metropolitan mass transit system in this country, you're stuck with the consequences.

And please spare us the crap of being of a metropolitan area "that aspires to be world-class but offers its workforce and visitors the nation's weakest public transit system." Every time these eggheads tell us we have to raise our taxes, they always roll out the "world-class" meme. It's getting a little old. The fact is that people move out of the inner city because the taxes, crime and schools aren't attractive. The jobs are going to the suburbs because life is more attractive there to them and that's where the jobs are being created. Fewer and fewer jobs are being created within the city. Those few jobs that are being created within the urban core come at a high cost. Local officials hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives and direct grants to coax businesses to local inside the I-465 beltway, a move that simply shifts the tax burden to the shrinking number of people who choose to live in the inner city.