Enough already on the police officers

Throughout the campaign, John Lassiter has consistently dissembled about one of the key differences between his record and Anthony's.

It concerns, as we've noted before, the 2006 budget process. (See here; scroll to the bottom.) The record could not be clearer:

Heading into City Council discussions about the 2006-07 budget, then-Police Chief Darrel Stephens had asked for 70 new police officers.

Then-City Manager Pam Syfert, in her budget proposal, included money for 55.

Lassiter and the other council Republicans floated a budget proposal that would have paid for 35.

Anthony and his fellow council Democrats proposed the budget that ultimately passed, with money for all 70 of the officers Stephens had asked for, plus $398 million in badly needed capital improvements, including road resurfacings for the first time in five years. The GOP proposal would have paid for $82 million in capital improvements -- 21 percent of what the city eventually agreed to spend.

More than three years later, during the campaign and in debates, Lassiter has claimed he found savings in that budget that would have enabled the city to hire all 70 extra officers without a tax increase.

Sorry. No sale. There's nothing in the record to back that up. If Lassiter and the council Republicans found those "savings" during the budget process in '06, they should have ponied up and put something on the table, taking care to explain what services were going to be cut in the backwash. They did not. End of discussion.

So here comes John Lassiter last week, suggesting a rollback of the tax hike.

Great idea, John. Tell you what: Go ahead and tell us which cops we should let go, and which streets scheduled for maintenance will just have to stay axle-busters. This is the guy who claims on his television ads that he's "law enforcement's friend, committed to getting repeat criminals off Charlotte's streets." Some friend.

You have to make choices in government, as you do in life; nobody likes higher taxes, but people tend not to like unpaved roads, suspended garbage pickup and rampant crime in the absence of police officers, either. So how do you decide?

Lassiter apparently would have ... both! One of his main goals, he says, is to keep taxes low and services high. We're happy he cleared that up. That's an evergreen, the primary challenge of governments since Ancient Mesopotamia. It says nothing. The trick is, how do you do it? Do you sacrifice public safety and road resurfacing -- which no one sane would consider luxuries -- to satisfy a no-tax-increase fetish?

Anthony doesn't think so. He's obviously not a fan of higher taxes, either, and he's not looking to line his pockets; unlike his opponent, he not only voted against the last council pay increase, he refused to accept it when it passed. But he's not going to ignore the community's needs when they're staring him, and all of us, in the face.

Think national for a minute. Think back to 1988, and George H.W. Bush, and "Read my lips: No new taxes." Poppy Bush, of course, eventually had to ask Congress to raise taxes. Conservatives did, and do, see this as a shameful capitulation to the forces of Creeping Socialism. That's certainly the lesson the elder Bush's son took with him into the White House. Worked out wonderfully for all of us, didn't it?

The thing is, though, that Bush 41's reneging on his promise may have been his finest hour, at least domestically. It saved the country from the kind of economic catastrophe we've been coping with for the last year or so, and it kept the recession of 1991-92 from being far, far worse. The lesson here shouldn't have been, "Never raise taxes." It should have been, "Don't make that promise in the first place, and do what you have to do for the good of the country."

Or, on a smaller scale, the city of Charlotte.