LPTN Chair Joshua Reed Eakle giving a brief update on the happenings of the Libertarian Party of Tennessee this month.
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Elected Libertarian Erika Bodoin Ebel gives her thoughts on local government funding of charities.Recently, I’ve been asked about charitable contributions made from the County with taxpayer money. This is something that most people do not know about and are shocked to find out. I’ve been told that this is fairly common practice among local governments but not universal.
My personal opinion is that even with a budget flush with excess revenue, it is not the place of the government to allocate taxpayer dollars toward charities they deem “worthy”. If we have that much excess money laying around, why not give it back to the taxpayers and let them contribute to the charities that matter to them personally?! As I’m sure you are all aware, we definitely don’t have any excess money in our budget and charitable contributions are not a necessary function of government.
I absolutely get the good at these charities do, but it is not up to the government to decide which ones to subsidize, especially when we talking about the dire financial straits we find ourselves in right now. The situation gets even more “icky” when commissioners are voting on which ones to fund and which ones not to fund.
These contributions can be found under the General Fund portion of the budget, line 101-58900-316 in the amount of $27,100. Below is a breakdown of that line item by individual charity. (This is in the currently proposed budget for 2019-2020, recommended by the Budget and Finance Committee, still to be voted on by the full Commission).
I know there are some people (some Commissioners even) that will not agree with my take on this but I just don’t believe that we can possibly ask people to hand over more money to a government when they are overstepping their function in this way. Yes, these are all great causes that do great things in the community (I’m involved with and have donated time and money to several of them), but it is really the job of the citizens to help support them individually. ... See MoreSee Less
