In many small North Country towns, government is community
This week, two stories caught my eye and ear. The first was a piece in the New York Times looking at efforts to save Newcomb’s school district, a fight that we’ve covered here at NCPR. The passage that jumped out at me was this one:
George H. Canon, the town supervisor, feared the worst: “If the school died, the town would lose its purpose.” The school system, with 35 jobs, is Newcomb’s biggest employer.
And then there was the story on NCPR’s airwaves, reported by Steve Knight, about the fight to save a dozen North Country post offices. In Steve’s story, two passages leaped off the page:
“This is kind of what’s left of our community. We’ve lost our stores. We have one store. A lot of bars though,” one Parishville resident said.
And then there was this section, which included the views of North Country Rep. Bill Owens.
Post offices are important to communities [according to Owens] because they are a social center where people interact and keep tabs on one another.
“[B]ecause these are small communities, when someone doesn’t show up after a day or so, people will look in on them and make sure there isn’t something seriously wrong,” Owens said. “So we run a real risk of losing that social fabric.”
These very different politicians — conservative Republican George Canon and moderate Democrat Bill Owens — are describing a very real phenomenon.
In much of our region, government entities from schools and post offices to nursing homes, armories and senior centers have become the heart and soul of communities.
Taxpayer-driven programs provide meeting places, opportunities to break bread, venues to hear music, not to mention gymnasiums and playing fields where we watch our favorite sports teams slug it out.
But is it a good thing that government is our pivot point?
Are we asking entities like schools and post offices to fulfill functions that are inappropriate or force them to wander from their core missions — things like educating children well, or delivering the mail efficiently.
And if it is a good thing, is it sustainable? Newcomb spends $70,000 per student educating children and has a 3-to-1 pupil-teacher ratio. And the sad truth is that many of these rural post offices see scant use.
Should they be kept alive because of their social value?
Let me say that I grieved when my hometown post office — in Sitka, Alaska — closed its doors. And I’ve been in a funk this year because Lake Colby school, where my son Nicholas started kindergarten, is shutting down.
So I get the value of these places on an emotional level. But I think it’s fair to ask whether other institutions might not step up to replace government programs as community centers.
I’m thinking now of the grange in Wadhams or Bluseed in Saranac Lake or the host of new farmers markets. Those are vital, vibrant crossroads for local people.
If there is a real fabric and spirit left in these small towns, might it not find a new outlet that doesn’t need taxpayer subsidies?
As always, your thoughts welcome.
For perspective:
A small town restaurant is lacking customers and has to close. It had been a meeting place in town for almost a century.
The owner said to the residents of the town: “We have you credit card information on file. We’ll just charge $300 per month on you tab so we don’t have to close down.”
Everyone agreed.
Next year things got worse. “We’ll just keep charging $400 per month on your tab so we don’t have to close”.
Everyone agreed.
$500 per month, $600 per month, etc. Where does it stop? Eventually everyone runs out of money.
The only difference here is that because it’s our government doing the charging, we don’t see it happening.
JDM – the part that is property taxes increasing we do see happening and most people dont like that part. Even if local taxpayers are willing to pay 70K per year to educate each student, the neighboring districts that cant afford that are going to try to “consolidate”, or at least send some of their kids there. Its not sustainable.
Brian, I think it is a bit of a stretch to talk about schools and local government as being subsidized by the taxpayers.
Why? Well, to be fair I guess, we could say every state and federal agency, including all our elected officials from the President on down are subsidized by the taxpayers.
I would rather subsidized what is local than what is not local.
Peter Hahn:
Probably a better conclusion I could have come up with is that it doesn’t matter if it’s the Post Office, school, barber shop, or restaurant, there comes a point where we run out of money.
And we’re at that point.
we dont run out of money so much as have to choose between something we really like -local post office, local school etc, and paying for it when it gets more and more expensive. The issue seems to be how much do we value (in dollars) these important community centers, and are there other (cheaper) ones – Brians example of Bluseed and the Wadham Grange, that can be substituted.
The discussion needs to be broader than how do we cope with endless budget cutting. We don’t suffer from a financial deficit as much as we do from a moral deficit. It is no surprise Federal government revenue isn’t keeping up with normal expenses. We have had 30 years voodoo economics where income taxes have been constantly reduced to the point of where they are the lowest since the 1920s. And the US has the lowest taxes of any developed nation. Who have been the prime beneficiaries of these policies – large corporations and the wealthy. The tax cuts were supposed to generate larger tax revenues and more jobs. Never happened. And the middle class is paying the price of these misguided policies. Yet the Republicans in Congress keep talking more of the same even though the majority of Americans know they are wrong.
Cuts in government spending results in greater unemployment. People who are not working cannot spend much beyond the basic necessities. Private businesses have no reason to hire if there is no demand. The continuation of these irresponsible Republican policies and the failure of Obama to fight them will keep unemployment numbers at recession levels. And that appears to be the Republican plan to achieve their goal clearly stated by Minority Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on 10/25/10, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he said.
So now we are at the point of closing Post Offices, firing teachers, closing community centers, etc. I don’t expect to see the Republican Congress shedding any tears. As far as they are concerned anything related to public service or community is just socialism and should be eliminated. There is no “we” in today’s Republican Party, it’s all me, me, me and everyone else is on your own. I don’t imagine there are many day care centers, health clinics, community or senior citizen centers that are named after Ayn Rand. I wonder why?
Mine is one of the post offices currently slated for closing. The stated reason? People aren’t mailing letters like they used to, aren’t paying bills by mail like they used to, they are using the Internet. But many of these small town post offices are serving surrounding rural areas where there is no broadband access to the Internet. Ironically this morning I heard that grants to expand broadband to rural areas are another thing that they are considering chopping off. So these rural areas are losing their post offices over a shift to electric media that they don’t have.
The role of business is to make money. If a service doesn’t make money it goes out of business or at least closes in areas where it is unprofitable. The role of government is to provide those services that are necessary to “promote the general welfare” (quoted from the US Constitution), no mention of profit.
When you measure the success or failure of government services by profit you are abandoning the general welfare on the alter of $$$$$ and the stated role of government along with it. When profit becomes the important measure, the health, education and ability to communicate and participate in society are cut off to those segments of the national community that fail to be profitable.
Yes, government should subsidize community. That IS it’s role. It isn’t there to turn a profit or even break even.
And a note to all those enthralled with Ayn Rand’s novels: They are NOVELS… FICTION. Everything in them works out according to Ms. Rand’s philosophy because she writes it that way. She was in total control of the plot, the characters, everything. Just like J.K. Rowling who has school kids flying on brooms.
In the real world no one has has total control to make everything neatly work out according to their philosophy or beliefs. That’s why we have to compromise in order to live together peacefully. That’s why we all have to contribute to and/or make allowance for things we don’t personally use and sometimes even approve of. It’s called community. It is called being one nation.
Jim Bullard: “That’s why we all have to contribute to and/or make allowance for things we don’t personally use and sometimes even approve of. ”
I’m sure there are communities larger than Newcomb that don’t have their own school.
One cannot say, “it is written that providing for the general welfare equals having a school, or a post office, etc.”
One could say that making allowance for the good of the community equals losing your small town school, or post office, etc.
When I read these stories a part of me can’t help but feel that this is a struggle within these communities to hold on to the past.
Contorting themselves to maintain things that used to make sense, or that used to work at certain levels, or that used to be important… instead of letting them evolve… or, in some cases, facing the realities of today and letting them go.
Post offices… as social centers? That doesn’t strike me as something worth falling on our economic swords over.
And I understand that schools are a tougher, more emotional situation – but all of this effort to maintain school infrastructure and staffing at levels that are no longer needed just strikes me as wasted.
I suppose part of my problem is that I fail to see defeat or tragedy in having smaller communities.
Public schools in the US are unique in my opinion. They serve a unifying function for small communities in particular. Its the place where all families have a stake, regardless of their social standing or income, they all come together in the public school.
Other countries and in many cities in the US this is not the case.
Closing a post office is one thing, but when you lose all schools I think the community essentially dies. At that point it is mainly homes in a particular geographic area not a community.
Rather than closing a post office, wouldn’t it make more sense to, as a first step, keep it open but at shorter hours and maybe not on Saturdays? Try that first before something as disruptive as clsoure.
If everything in the past had been done or not done on the basis of the “bottom line,” we would not even have electricity here in the Adirondacks.
Fast forward to now.
Although nearly 90 percent of urban dwellers had electricity by the 1930s, only ten percent of rural dwellers did. Private utility companies, who supplied electric power to most of the nation’s consumers, argued that it was too expensive to string electric lines to isolated rural farmsteads.
Just as Rural Electrification was important for places like the Adirondacks in the 1930’s, now Rural Broadband is needed.
The arguments against it are the same.
Some things never change.
The same argument is made to drive rural schools out of existence. They cost too much so let’s close them.
You talk about Death Panels? I say we have a Death Panel when it comes to maintaining our rural communities. They cost too much. Let’s just put them out of their misery, so say some of our illustrious elected officials in Albany and Washington.
“One cannot say, “it is written that providing for the general welfare equals having a school, or a post office, etc.””
One can absolutely say that. One can also disagree with that. It’s neither required nor banned by the Constitution. It’s the exact reason we’re having this discussion in the first place.
As for schools, I’d like to see more consolidation. Perhaps existing schools can remain in use as elementary or middle schools. Or perhaps in some cases even as high schools within the multi-HS district. That would preserve the public use of the buildings which, as has been pointed out, is so important in these small towns. But savings would be achieved by eliminating administration, consolidating bus runs, purchasing, etc.
I’m with JDM. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. People wihtout money should live and die alone, and let the people with money keep it and live happily because they all earned it by dint of superior brains and work ethic. No taxes! Or post offices. Or schools also.
Right on OA. That sounds like something straight from the plans of head Republican budgeteer Paul Ryan, the idiot savant (sans savant) whose budget punishes the poor and middle class, rewards the wealthy, and drives us deeper in debt.
myown, why have the democrats not put forward a budget???
If you want to read a good book read L. Gooley’s “Oliver’s War”about the death of a small Adirondack town called Brandon. William Rockefeller tried to used the post office to kill that town.
“income taxes have been constantly reduced to the point of where they are the lowest since the 1920s.”
Not true.
“The discussion needs to be broader than how do we cope with endless budget cutting.”
Budgets have been constantly on the rise.
“And the US has the lowest taxes of any developed nation”
Again, not true.
Where are you getting this stuff??
Paul,
A quick look around the Internet would lead me to believe the only major country with a lower income tax than the USA, if you can call it a major country, is Switzerland.
Because of our federalist system taxes are hard to measure in the US. I think federal income taxes are pretty low; however they are only part of the tax picture, then you throw in state, county, municipal taxes that all vary wildly across the country and it is hard to get a picture.
However I would think that public schools would be near the top of the list of priorities.
What does it mean to be a community to have a common good? The idea that the bricklayer, the Lawyer and the single mom all educate their children in exactly the same place brings a community together in a uniquely American way and it is a very good thing we cannot afford to lose in my opinion. Needless to say I am not a fan of private schools.
Hello – Republicans control the House. They can make proposals whenever they want. Ryan’s budget was simply premature political grandstanding. There already is a Federal budget in place which was approved by Congress. Republicans voted for the current budget – which obviously was going to require the debt ceiling be raised in order to extend the Bush taxcuts. But now they want to hold raising the debt ceiling hostage despite agreeing to the budget they knew would require an increase in the debt ceiling. Unfortunately Obama hasn’t learned how to handle the Republican doublecrossers. I would tell the Republicans – Raise the debt ceiling with no conditions or the Bush tax cuts can not be extended.
Paul, be curious do a little homework.
I can’t include too many links or it won’t get posted.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/are-taxes-in-the-u-s-high-or-low/
http://visualizingeconomics.com/2011/04/14/top-marginal-tax-rates-1916-2010/
BTW, the author of the first link is Bruce Bartlett. His bio says, “has spent many years in government, including service on the staffs of Representatives Ron Paul and Jack Kemp and Senator Roger Jepsen. He has been executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration.”
myown: here’s what Bruce Bartlett says, from the link you provided:
“Historically, the term “tax rate” has meant the average or effective tax rate — that is, taxes as a share of income.
The broadest measure of the tax rate is total federal revenues divided by the gross domestic product.
By this measure, federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years.”
—-
Bruce is comparing the tax rate to GDP, not to personal income.
Pardon me, but duhhhh. He isn’t measuring the percentage tax against income. He is measuring it against GDP.
How does GDP affect your daily life? I don’t have the slightest hint of GDP.
How does your personal income affect your daily life? Mine affects me alot.
In Mr. Bartlett’s world, if GDP goes up, his tax rate measurement goes down. He isn’t measuring personal income tax rate, he is simply measuring GDP.
What does that have to do with anything? Answer – not a thing.
JDM – not surprised you don’t see the facts as they are. If you read the whole article he also talks about actual income tax rates. No matter how you slice it the fact is, personal, corporate and capitol gains tax rates have dropped dramatically since 1980 and are the lowest in 60 to 80 years. Plus taxes in the US are lower than other developed countries. Be sure to see the other chart. There are zillions of charts and articles that have these facts and they are all available on the internets.
JDM – Mr. Bartlett is a Republican economist presenting that information. I thought you would have been more respecting of his word. GDP is commonly used as a way to measure taxes, especially when comparing different countries. But regardless, this is Mr. Bartlett’s conclusion at the end of the article, “The truth of the matter is that federal taxes in the United States are very low. There is no reason to believe that reducing them further will do anything to raise growth or reduce unemployment.”
More data:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/04/top-ten-tax-charts.html
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/06/low_tax.html
Are we talking about the same thing here? Post Offices… the place where you pick up and send snail mail?
I think I’ve been to a post office, maybe, a dozen times in my life. I’ve lived in a handful of places where I couldn’t even begin to tell you where the PO was.
The idea of a PO as a community center or somehow vital to everyday life is completely foreign to me. This is why I have a hard time understanding the hand wringing that goes on over a closure.
Paul, I won’t comment on the facts you are disputing… but our Tax burden is the lowest it has been since 1958. I think that speaks to the point some here are making. We are not the overtaxed, financially oppressed society that some seem to believe.
Dave, I really hate the term “snail mail.” Some smug jerk came up with the name a long time ago and it isn’t very clever to use after the first 10 millionth time.
It is mail. Email is useful for communicating but it is only a shadow of actually moving a physical object from place to place, and sometimes only the real physical object will do.
But part of a community is the public space. We need both we need private and public spaces, parks, schools, post office’s plus business’s, private homes, private lands, these combine to make a community.
To much on either realm is not good.
myown:
I do read the articles, and I even post the quote from the article before I comment on it so that the point I make is very clear.
You mentioned this, “If you read the whole article he also talks about actual income tax rates.”
I did read the whole article. Here is the part that talks about “actual income tax rates”
“the average federal income tax rate on the 400 richest people in America was 18.11 percent in 2008, according to the Internal Revenue Service, down from 26.38 percent when these data were first calculated in 1992”
That says that under Bush, the tax rate was lower than under the beginning of Clinton’s administration. No surprise there.
Look, myown. I don’t need no eggspert in economy to tell me that I am not paying too much in taxes. I know when I am paying too much in taxes, and I am.
He switched the numbers to make his lame point. I don’t care what party he is affiliated with. I care about what it is he is saying. How refreshing is that?!!
If capital gains tax were eliminated for the next two years, and the income tax rates frozen or lowered, this economy would take off like it in the past when similar things were done. The government income would double, and we would leave China in the dust. Too bad I am not there to lead the way.
“the average federal income tax rate on the 400 richest people in America was 18.11 percent in 2008”
One more thing. Whooooo cares what the tax rate on the 400 richest people in America???
That’s how Mr. Bartlett convinces you and me that our tax rates are lower? He ain’t no eggspert when it comes to you and me.
“Republicans voted for the current budget – which obviously was going to require the debt ceiling be raised in order to extend the Bush taxcuts”
So I see, the “bush” and now what I would call the “obama” tax cuts are the whole of the US budget?
There is no other area of the budget that could be cut to off set this???
While some here can’t comprehend the post office as a community center and rarely use the USPS there are many in rural areas of the North Country who have no Internet access or at best a dial-up system too slow to be of much use. And then there are the elderly who can neither afford the equipment necessary to access the Internet or have the desire to learn to use it if they had it. Where I live the PO is the only place those folks meet regularly, catch up on their neighbors, etc.
Ironically one of the other things now threatened by cutbacks is expansion of broadband to rural areas. There may come a day when the postal service is truly obsolete but until access to broadband reaches the rural areas we aren’t there yet. Meantime it is the more populated areas where broadband IS widely available that are abandoning the use of the postal service while it is the rural areas that are losing postal offices.
First off, Newcombs school has been of the rocks for over 20 years at least. Once National Lead, IP and Finch left town the end was in sight. They’ve done a whole mess of nifty schemes to keep the school going, like making it a “magnet school”. The only reason it’s still open is because they got a lot of funding from National Lead (IIRC) which died out when the property was sold to the state- again, IIRC. A 3-1 student-teacher ratio? And 35 staff are employed? So if even 30 of the staff are actually teachers, a high number, then we’re talking maybe 90 students K-12? Sorry, but the school either needs to close, dump 2/3 or more of their staff or come up with a new source of funding.
As far as the “spirit of the community” goes, something else will take the place of the Post Office or school. The school and PO didn’t used to be the community centers. it used to be the churches, the fraternal organizations like the Grange, Odd Fellows, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4H, the Rotary, Little League, Babe Ruth, K of C, Masons, etc. It used to be the community dances, dinners and sales. It used to be businesses sponsoring adult athletic teams or parades. The various fire companies still serve that purpose to an extent. But since we got TV and computers we don’t have the sense of community we had long ago. It’s laughable to think that having a post office means community, that’s just absurd. A school is more realistic, but even then, the schools aren’t what they were. We live in an insular world where it’s just too much trouble to maintain a community. It’s lot’s easier and less expensive to sit at the computer or in front of the tube being entertained. Is it better? Not in my opinion, but I’m not giving up more tax dollars to “promote the general welfare” of the tiny, tiny minority of people whose social activity occurs at a post office or to contribute even more to our bloated school budgets. It’s pretty hard to see why we need to take more from the middle class when unemployment is rising and costs are skyrocketing.
Promoting the general welfare does not, in any way, mean to our good money after bad just to maintain the status quo. And some want to blame Republicans??? Hey, wake up and look around you. It wasn’t just one party spending us into insolvency over the past 70 years. It wasn’t one party making up stupid laws that forced bans to make dumb loans to unqualified applicants. It wasn’t one party coming up with nifty ideas like The Great Society, Vietnam, the Cold War, Obamacare and trickle down poverty. Give credit where it’s due. This IS Obama and the left economy now.
Pete, mainline rural electrification was an issue for sure. But those who wanted it produced their own power at their farms, businesses and homes. Many communities also produced municipal power. The REA brought power to rural areas, yes, but it would have gone through eventually anyway.
Jim Bullard: “Where I live the PO is the only place those folks meet regularly, catch up on their neighbors, etc. ”
Jim, at what price?
Is there a Stewarts in your community? A gas station? A park? A neighbor’s porch?
The Post Office has government employees, overhead, requirements, etc. that cost beaucoup $$’s to provide. I’m sure that if those $$’s were redirected, a much more reasonably priced community meeting place could be supplied, or an existing place would organically take its place.
That’s not an argument for keeping the Post Office open. Find the need, fill the need.
I guess it all depends on what you think the basics are.
To me food and shelter and a job come first.
But having pointed out what should be obvious, those basics now depend upon other basics.
Basics for the basics include roads and bridges, electricity, water, sewer, health and education. Now as we go forward, broadband is fast becoming a basic.
You want a decent economy, then you need all of the above.
JDM, I vote for your porch.
By the way, since this thread has deteriorated into the usual ideological standoff, this is a great piece from Andrew Sullivan, a Reaganite and Thatcherite conservative:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/06/conservatism-is-true.html
Worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a money quote–“Back in the 1980s, conservatism was a thrilling empirical, reality-based challenge to overweening government power and omniscient liberal utopianism. Today, alas, it has become a victim of its own success, reliving past glories rather than tackling current problems. It is part secular dogma – no taxes, no debt, more war – and part religious dogma – no Muslims need apply; amend the federal constitution to keep gays in their place; no abortions even for rape and incest; more settlements on the West Bank to prepare for the End-Times.
Of course we need to move physical objects. And there are lots of ways to do this. I just got a delivery to my house this morning.
You have to ask yourself, do we need a dedicated building and the supporting infrastructure in every small community to do this? Clearly that doesn’t make sense economically – otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So the question being raised here is do we pay the cost of this infrastructure anyway simply so that a few people have a place to hang out and say hi to one another?
Hard for me to think of a justification for that when, lets be honest, people can meet and socialize anywhere. But I concede the point that my experiences may differ from others. And that returns me to my original point, that this seems to be partially about holding onto the past. If the post office has always been where older, smaller communities socialize, then I can understand their feelings (if not their logic) in not wanting to let that go.
And I do think Jim makes a good point about the irony of who gets broadband, and who is losing postal offices.
This is an oddly fascinating topic for me. I feel compelled to walk down to the PO and hang out for a few hours now. :-)
I am not sure about the post office I think it may stand for something real, an outpost of the federal government that gives legitimacy to a village. In addition in the poorer villages where many people pay their bills with money orders they can do that at the post office, things like that.
I am not saying it is worth the money I don’t know if it is or not, but it has a real meaning. Maybe it is from the past when people didn’t have all of the communications tools at home but got out and talked to one another in public spaces, causing less isolation.?
I am not a part of the Post Office as hang-out crowd. The Postal Service is a business, albeit a socialized business, and it should have to cover its costs.
The problem is that it can’t raise rates or make any substantial changes to the way it provides its services without specific Congressional approval, and many in Congress want to see the Postal Service fail along with Amtrak and President Obama. UPS and FedEx provide great service but they do not provide 6 day a week service to virtually every household in America and the cost for an individual to ship something as simple as a letter is exorbitant.
The Postal Service is probably the greatest value we still have, and the carriers are highly reliable, but service should be cut to 5 days a week.
I have to agree with Knuck to a point- the Postal Service is still a good value compared to Fed Exing a letter. But, I don’t mail more than 2-3 letters a month and those are bills with no way to pay electronically. Once a year we get a letter from friends in England and I get a couple magazines each month. Everything else is unrequested advertising, credit offers, notices from the Gov’t, State or County about things of no importance and of course notices that we’re in the final stages of winning some sweepstakes we never entered. I’ve chatted with my mail carrier and have seen that the vast majority of his load is Junk Mail. IN the line of our recent energy conservation rants, wouldn’t it be far more economical for all these businesses to use electronic advertising? Yeah, they could continue to mail to the Amish and those with no internet connection, ( The Amish kid down the road loves the Victorias Secret catalogs!), but wouldn’t it be far cheaper for them and the postal service that way?
Just a thought. Plus, I wouldn’t have to burn all that junk mail! I can just delete electrons.