Distinguished Members of the General Assembly:

My name is Arthur Purves. I address you as president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.

There is no need to raise taxes for transportation.

Despite recent tax hikes and soaring tax revenues, state Senator John Chichester, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, tells us that we cannot divert existing taxes to transportation because most of these revenues are needed for public education, courts and prisons, and Medicaid, all of which are outpacing the growth of population and inflation.

What he does not say is that public school-spending has been increasing ten times faster than enrollment, even after adjusting for inflation. Public-school staff has been increasing seven times faster than enrollment. The result? According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, 65 percent of Virginia school children score below grade level.

Because of the public schools’ century-old hostility to phonics, low-income children do not learn to read, thus making them dependent of government welfare. Before the Civil War, it was illegal to teach a slave to read because the ability to read, it was thought, would empower an individual to be independent. Not much has changed. Slavery destroyed families at the auction block. Today welfare destroys families by incentivizing out-of-wedlock births with free housing, food, childcare, and healthcare. It is government schools and government welfare that turn our vulnerable youth into felons and feeds Virginia’s prison population, which is growing four times faster than overall population. Government has become the modern-day plantation.

High medical inflation is in part due to the government takeover of healthcare through Medicaid and, at the federal level, Medicare. These single-payer systems destroy market restraints, increase administrative costs, and encourage fraud. Their high cost is the major cause of the federal deficits, putting us at the mercy of the Japanese and Chinese, who are buying an increasing percentage of our debt.

Medicaid was supposed to provide long-term care to the poor, but with the right lawyer, well-to-do families can qualify.

We do support Medicaid funding for the disabled. However the overdue refurbishing of the state mental health system could have been funded long ago but for the excessive funding of government schools and welfare, which demand more taxes every year.

The problem of course is that no income taxes and almost no sales taxes are spent on transportation. Instead they fund the growing problems created by welfare, the government takeover of healthcare, and the education empire. The transportation solution is to acknowledge the damage caused by social spending and to let transportation compete against social spending for income taxes and all sales taxes.

Thank you.

Updated March 29, 2006