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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Andrew Friedson has been starving the capital budget and the operating budget with tax breaks for his donors for eight years. Now the bill is due. He will vote for all the spending and then make a big show of voting against the taxes to pay for it. He won’t lose any sleep over this because he got 100 percent tax abatements for his donors. [/quote]

The capital budget isn't free. Debt service comes from the operating budget. Like you're running up credit card debt and making bigger and bigger monthly payments on it, never paying it down. That debt service crowds out operating budget capacity. [/quote]

Right. Friedson has reduced taxes for developers that otherwise would have gone to fund the capital budget (so the county has to borrow more to build schools for new housing) and reduced property taxes for developers that otherwise would have gone to fund the operating budget (so the county could service more debt). When you give out sweetheart deals to your donors eventually someone has to pay. That someone is the rest of us and eventually is now.

Friedson is the most fiscally reckless of all of them because he has simultaneously voted for all the spending, sponsored bills that hollow out the tax base, and voted against measures to fund his spending. [/quote]

He's not reckless at all.  
He opposed an Elrich-based property tax hike last year.
He opposed an Elrich-based income tax hike in 2024. 
What he hasn't done, as far as I can tell, is go after Elrich's Net Zero policy which is adding about 5% additional cost to capital projects.

Friedson's PILOT program does defer property taxes for office conversions to residential units.  That spurs development (because it's very expensive to convert office space to apartments/condos), encourages more housing, and more housing in a tight market helps to at least stabilize prices.  Although I doubt it would bring them down.  But more housing is good for the county.

He's just not doing what you want, which is to ignore middle class and center lower-income people.  Like rent control.  Which artificially keeps rent down when everything around us is inflating.  Why not tackle inflation itself?

Not saying we shouldn't help lower-income folks.  We should.  But that shouldn't be all we do.  The Republicans focus on helping the super wealthy and the Democrats focus on helping the super-poor.  They both forget the middle class.  And Democrats, in particular, should be ashamed of themselves for doing so.  Poor people will always stay poor if you cut out the middle rungs on the ladder they are trying to climb.[/quote]

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