TSPLOST: Get Your Story Straight

Unless you've been Rip Van Winkled you cannot help but notice the $8Million carpet bombing of media adverts in support of TSPLOST. These suffer not only from the overall flexibility of the message -- "It's about congestion...no, no...it's about trains...no, no...it really IS about development" -- but more importantly the messages are self contradictory.

In one advert we're told "The Yankees are comin! The Yankees are comin!" and that it is inevitable that the region's population will grow by "X" million over a mere "Y" years. It's like a cancer that just won't go into remission no matter how hard we don't try. They're coming and they can't be stopped. Therefore, and here's the hook, we just MUST pass this sales tax to handle the onslaught!

But in a competing advert we're told something quite different. We're told that Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, and a host of other third tier American cities[1] are going to clean our clocks and steal away any hope we have of continued growth. THIS is presented as the uncontestable reason we MUST pass this sales tax -- if we don't then growth will pass us by!

REALLY??!!!???? Puhleeze. Get your story straight. These garbled, contradictory messages have us wondering not WHICH of these two fools are experts on the issue, but whether the TSPLOST-ers have any expertise at all.

Seems like the pro-taxers are hellbent on getting this thing pushed through and will prostitute themselves in the most obscene ways to make it happen. But just because they're tax whores doesn't mean the voters are all DFCs.

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[1]Yes, you must set aside the prevaricating politicians' pontifications about Atlanta being an "international city" in which case we should be competing with the likes of Tokyo, Paris, London, Bejing, Sidney, ... and not "Ship Dit, Alabama". Golly how the truth doth out.