What is Seen, and What is Not Seen in Palm Bay

More than 150 years ago Frederic Bastiat wrote his famous essay, “What is seen, and what is not seen”. As the City of Palm Bay moves to put their Mini-Me New Deal to the ballot, what is seen is money will be spent by the city ($13 million) to allegedly create jobs.

What is not seen is how many jobs may have been created had the citizens been permitted to spend their own money as they saw fit. The entire thought of of a city taxing people (a job destroying mechanism) to create other jobs is a scene straight from the Michael Moore film of years ago, Roger and Me, where the city of Flint, Michigan, bedeviled by thousands of laid off autoworkers, builds a tourist attraction called Auto World to ‘stimulate’ tourism and ‘create’ jobs. I expect Palm Bay will be as successful as Flint.

The major expenditure of the referendum dollars will be on roads, a necessary expenditure but unnecessarily tied to the politcally well connected insider fiscal expenditures we will see with the above $13 million. The plan as outlined below by one of its primary supporters (more to follow) calls for an initial bonding of more than $60 million to cover the road paving, which is 30 year debt service for a 20 year repaving job. of course by year 21 with the road money spent and the job money pilfered who will remember why the citizens are still paying and who was responsible for dreaming up the plan?

I am of course just shocked the Palm Bay Chamber of Commerce endorses this plan. Everyone knows, after all, that higher taxes always stimulate more business. I do have to enjoy the euphemisms of taxes being labeled ‘community investments’, but being a referendum, should the ciizens of Palm Bay vote it in it is definitely their investment.

The Florida Today, never having met an unwanted tax, is obviously in support. Some things never change.