Key would “should”, but there’s a lot of misinformation being bantered around lately about whether politicians know better than the people regarding taxes.

I’ll start with a premise that yes, we all want our taxes to be lowered. But after that I depart from our demogogue GOP friends.

Colorodo may have passed TABOR (the Taxpayer Bill of Rights) but quickly found their schools going downhill and infrastructure failing.

We pay our political leaders to do their homework and to seek the background information from competent administrators that will help them make a reasonable decision that will lead to sound fiscal policies.

When those political leaders take that information, we expect them to evaluate it to decide whether the services provided are worth the costs and if there is a better way to economize in order to provide those same services for less. We’re all for more services for less money but let’s face it, most of the time that’s just a pipe dream. This is not to say that there isn’t waste in government — the thousand dollar toilet seat stories in the federal government are proof positive that there is waste, but it is much reduced in local government where the average person can attend city council meetings or village board meetings.

There are costs that cannot be controlled by local leaders. Costs such as heating and cooling bills, gasoline for automobiles and highway fleets and even inflation. When officials or talk radio show hosts ignore these uncontrollable costs, they do so at the publics peril.

Yes, it is a compelling and sexy argument that government can always do more for less but at its core, that argument is dishonest at best and hurtful to those who rely on government services to meeting their basic needs.

Consider just a few cases:

Children whose parents meet an unplanned and early demise are sometimes tossed into the foster care system but what would the alternative be if there were not foster parents willing to care for them? How would these foster care parents meet the needs of the children? If there was not some financial reimbursement for expenses incurred by foster parents in the care of these children, many would not even accept these children into their homes. The alternative is a Charles Dickens style of homelessness with children starving in the streets and stealing what little they can to feed themselves.

Handicapped persons who rely on paratransit to get to work, school or even the grocery store would lose their independence and if there is no funds to care for them, they would rely on family members to meet their basic needs — at least those who have family.

These examples are but a few of the core services that the public relies on and for those of us who value a sense of community and who still maintain a semblance of compassion in our hearts, must fight for.