Since Katherine Hanley was re-elected Fairfax County Board of Supervisors chairman two years ago, county taxes for the typical household have increased more than they did in the previous 19 years.

In the last three years, residential real estate taxes have increased 32 percent. Adjusted for inflation, household county taxes of all types will have increased 20 percent in three years.

Listening to the PTA, you would believe that government budgets do not keep up with inflation, population and school enrollment. The facts are otherwise.

This year's Fairfax County budget of $2 billion is $1 billion more than is needed to cover the inflation, population and school enrollment growth of the last 25 years. Annual spending increases add up.

Similarly, the Virginia state budget of $23.5 billion is $8 billion more than is needed to cover inflation, population, and school and college enrollment growth of the last two decades.

The car tax cut returned only one-tenth of the $8 billion to the taxpayer. None of the extra revenue went to transportation, which is government's lowest priority.

The county spends almost nothing on transportation because transportation is the state's responsibility. At the state level, most of the extra revenue was from income taxes, and state government does not spend income taxes on transportation.

Most of the extra county and state revenue went to public schools, welfare and public safety.

Over the past 20 years, inflation-adjusted public school spending per student has doubled in Virginia. Fairfax County's school operating budget has almost $800 million more this year than is needed to cover inflation and enrollment growth since 1975.

A fraction of that $800 million would fund all needed school construction and renovation, but the School Board refuses to fund building construction from the operating budget.

Instead, the board increased school staff almost four times faster than enrollment, which produced no significant increase in test scores.

Recall that it used to be illegal to teach a slave to read. Just the ability to read could empower an individual to be independent.

Today, our public schools, because of their hostility toward phonics-based reading instruction, still do not teach low-income students how to read. That is evident in the minority student achievement gap, which first appears in fourth-grade standardized test scores.

By not teaching reading, public schools perpetuate class differences and guarantee a continuing constituency for welfare.

Despite "welfare reform," Fairfax County inflation-adjusted per-capita welfare spending has increased 180 percent since 1975.

Welfare destroys families. Since Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" introduced massive welfare, the percentage of black children born into single-parent homes has increased from 23 percent to 68 percent.

For whites, it increased from 2 percent to 27 percent. The "safer sex" message of public school Family Life Education sanctions promiscuity, and Hollywood glamorizes it.

Because fatherless children are more likely to become incarcerated, that might explain why Virginia per-capita spending for the administration of justice also increased 200 percent over the past two decades.

Funding damaging school and welfare programs is government's growth industry. There is, however, something you can do.

Please visit the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance Web site (www.fcta.org) and sign the online petition to reduce the growing tax burden in Fairfax County.