Mayor Greg Ballard decided to hold a town hall meeting last night at the Pike Performing Arts Center to pitch his plan to create a new city-funded pre-K education spending plan financed with higher property taxes on Marion County residents through the elimination of the homestead property tax credit. Ballard used radio talk show host Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, a pariah in most of the city's black community, to lead the panel discussion that aired live on WIBC-FM. According to black radio talk show host Amos Brown, the outreach effort was an utter failure. Only a handful of people showed up, many of whom weren't even black. "If purpose of this Mayor Town Hall at Pike was to reach black community, it failed miserably," tweeted Brown, who counted only 58 people in attendance. Ballard's mouthpieces in the local news media were livid when the council's Rules & Finance Committee voted last night to table his proposal to eliminate the homestead property tax credit over the opposition of committee Republicans, who can't seem to find a tax increase they oppose these days.
2 comments:
Education is NOT a funciton of cities.
It is a Constitutional responsibility of The State of Indiana. Article 8 of The State Constitution states: "Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it should be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual scientific, and agricultural improvement; and provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall without charge, and equally open to all. The principal of the Common School fund shall remain a perpetual fund, which may be increased, but shall never be diminished; and the income thereof shall be inviolably appropriated to the support of Common Schools, and to no other purpose whatever.
I suspect that a more appropriate name for Ballard's program would be "Taxpayer-paid babysitting". If it were education, that would be a requirement for The State to fund it.
Government programs are adult daycare; beyond funding the armed forces (national defense) & Constitutionally skeletal purpose of our three branches.
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