This expense is for the old wood house in the Town of Occoquan called the visitors center. The county foots the bill right down to the phone bill.

The cost of this program may be very small relative to the cost of other things, I don’t know. However, even if small, it’s too great.

yes, it is my opinion. It is based on applying the same philosophy the founders used. Not about the federal government, but about government in general, as they described it in the Federalist Papers.

How do I draw the line? That isn’t a trivial question, and the answer isn’t easy. I don’t even draw the line the same way every time, and find myself persuaded from time to time on things I would have initially rejected.

The short answer is that I try to determine if a program primarily helps individuals, or if it primarily helps the community.

I realise that any program that “helps individuals” could have a side effect of helping the community, and most programs will have some component of “helping the community” and “helping individuals”.

But in general, I see government as being for the community, not for the individuals in the community. And if a program is primarily providing services to individuals, it is suspect in my view.

This means for example that I might object to a program which provided shelter for the homeless. The argument that might persuade me on that would be the harm to the community of homeless people crashing in people’s back yards or in the woods starting fires and threatening our property.

On the other hand, we don’t issue driver’s licenses to people because we think they really could use a nice pice of plastic with their picture on it. We do so because we feel it’s important to the community to control who drives on the roads. So DMV is a legitimate government program.

It’s a work in progress for me, as it is for all of us. If it was simple we wouldn’t have such an argument over it.

The Founders had a wise idea which we threw away through amendments. That was that any money collected by government should be paid equally by EVERYBODY. That way, nobody can use the government as a way to take money from their neighbor for their own use.

Today, what stops government from heavily taxing the top 10% of rich people, and using the money to buy everybody else a big-screen TV? Only the fast-fading morality of the general populace that understands it would be wrong to take other people’s money for our own pleasure. It isn’t votes — the 90% would vastly outvote the 10%.

And we are losing that morality. People don’t feel any shame at all walking into a hearing and proudly asking other people to pay for things for themselves.

The Senior Day Center is a perfect example. It’s not some multi-million-dollar cost. Frankly, it isn’t much more expensive to put a senior in a program than it is to put your child into a program. It’s “expensive”, but it’s not prohibitive.

So why should I have to pay for someone else to send their parents to day care? Or think of it this way — what if every taxpayer in the county decided the government should provide day care for THEIR parents?

Then we’d have to increase taxes to pay for it all, and in the end pretty much everybody would pay as much extra in taxes as it cost to send their own parents to the program.

Instead of wasting time getting 30 people to give up a day to get the government to take money out of MY pocket by force to put someone else’s parents in day care, why don’t those 30 people do a days labor and donate the money to a facility to care for the parents? Why don’t they come ask me nicely for money — maybe I would be moved to an act of personal charity.

The answer: because it’s a whole lot easier to take things by force than to convince people to give charity. And it’s a whole lot easier to talk 8 people into giving you someone else’s money, than it is to get those other people to give directly.

Question Charles - is this just an opinion that this isn’t a “government task”?

On the federal level, it is quite clear what is and is not a legitimate government function and cost - the constitution governs that. And as a nation, we are spending oodles of money that is in no way “constitutional.”

But by what do you judge what is and is not a legitimate cost/function of local government? Is the criteria to be simply something that you don’t want to pay for and that you don’t think you’ll ever utilize? Or is there some more objective standard?

Given what I’ve read from you, it is my opinion that you would like to see virtually everything eliminated from government purview (and all of the resultant pennies and dimes back in your pocket). Fair enough, but exactly what are you using to draw that line?

Regarding the PWC Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) that you reference above, this organization is fully funded via a portion of the 5% Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) that is levied on all hotel stays in the County. In effect, this tax is paid for by out of town visitors and not by local residents.

The initial 2 percentage points of the TOT are placed into the County’s General Fund. Then, the remaining 3 percentage points are used to promote tourism, travel and hotel stays within the County. It is my understanding that the Commonwealth requires any TOT in excess of 2% to be used in this fashion.

The CVB uses its funding on a wide variety of promotional programs all intended to drive business into our County from other areas (both in state and out of state). Some of this advertising has been for events such as the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, our historical sites and the President’s Cup in previous years. In addition, the CVB is working with the hotels to recruit larger gatherings into our County.

Please remember that when an out of town guest stays in one of our hotels, he or she will generally shop in our shops and eat in our restaurants. This is both helpful to our local economy and to our County’s tax base.

There’s a lot of money going to private organizations. If those organizations meet an essential government purpose, we should evaluate the expenditure to ensure we are getting a good deal for our money. If not, I don’t care about how much extra we get, or how nice the program is, we shouldn’t spend county taxpayer’s money on it.

Give everybody a tax cut, and let them donate their own money to charity.

I just finished the a book on charitable giving that noted that when government gives money to charity, it cuts private giving by something around 40%. Which means that for every dollar of tax money donated to charity, the charity only receives about 60 cents in benefit, because the charity loses 40 cents in private donations.

The correlary is that when government stops charity giving, private donations increase. AND if you give people more of their own money back, they give more to charity.

It is so very hard to cut ANYTHING from a budget. Look at the Senior Day Care center. It’s a vastly underused program costing lots of money for a service we shouldn’t even be considering as a government task. There’s only about 27 participants total, and only 4 are full-time.

But in TWO WEEKS, the people who want that program were able to put together a “grass-roots” organization which was able to bring more than THIRTY people to a board meeting and sit all day to fight to keep the program (that’s more people than actually USE the program).

I want the ten cents back from my taxes that pay for that program, but I’m not going to take a day off from work to go fight for my dime — I’d be more productive looking for a dime sitting around in the street.

The few who get the benefits are always more motivated than the hundreds of thousands who pay the costs.

BTW, at the meeting Tuesday, the recommendation was that if the program was underutilized, we could fix that by spending MORE money to ADVERTISE the program so that more people would use it — in other words, spend more of my money to talk more people into getting money from the government so next time around there will be MORE people who are willing to fight to keep it.

Two of our supervisors, including a republican, thought this was a great idea.