I supported Tara Zrinski for County Executive in 2025. I would again. She’s a hard working, smart, compassionate woman who wants to do what’s best for people who need that from a government. I hear from Republican county employees that they think she genuinely cares about them, and the jobs they do. Two things can be true at once though. I also think her 43.5% tax increase is bad politics and policy. It also appears that her defense of it at the last County Council meeting also wasn’t great. It was awful politics because it’s deeply unpopular with everyone, and it never had a chance in hell of getting the votes on council, which won’t stop it from passing, but it will literally dog her politically everywhere she goes for the next three years. It’s also bad policy. The public can’t afford it. People are squeezed by the price of living right now. You can ask, who shouldn’t get a raise, what should we do with government function X, but the reality is that if your public can’t afford the taxes, you become a dying community. The reality on the size and scope of government is you shouldn’t do anything that causes genuine pain to your public, even if that means you unfortunately can’t take care of everyone.

I also supported Lamont McClure for eight years, and was the Executive Director of his 2017-18 transition, not to mention I supported him for Congress. His government was incredibly lean, and I applauded that. Gracedale, Open Space, and low taxes were his entire political agenda as Executive, and frankly that was where the emphasis needed to be. He resisted silly ideas like building a new jail at Gracedale and always recognized that “the general consensus at the court house” was completely disconnected from the reality of the voters. He was a good Executive. But two things can be true at once though. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. By not doing anything to raise revenue and using federal and state one time revenue sources up to avoid tax increases, eventually there wasn’t enough money to do the functions that are needed. Departments can only run lean for so long. You run out of space to stretch your dollars. And the bill comes due. No, it doesn’t come 43% due, or all due in one swift motion, but it comes due.

The situation at Northampton County isn’t unique. Lehigh County is doing a tax increase in the high teens. Most of the cities are doing tax increases now or in the near future. Schools are doing them all over. Government just costs more, because everything costs more. Now yes, executives should probably stay lean and limit their tax increases to funding the government as it exists or where it’s in crisis (my understanding is the situation at Northampton County prison is dire and that Gracedale needs nursing help), but it is unfair to blame new executives for the simple presence of any tax increase at all. Neither of the Lehigh Valley’s counties did a meaningful tax cut with their executives on their ways out the door, which was their prerogative, but did leave a need. Some of the cities in the Lehigh Valley have been avoiding tax increases for years by simply not filling out their work forces and neglecting things that are there jobs. The new person shouldn’t be blamed for trying to keep the city functional. On the other hand, new executives at all levels of the government then need to realize that a structural deficit is not a good time to promise things to the work force, make good on campaign promises, or live out their ideological dreams for the local government. People just can’t afford it.

We all need to recognize though that government has costs. There are seniors always complaining about property taxes, and liberals who want to eliminate sales or consumption taxes, and conservatives that want to whine that rich people and corporations cost too much- well then who the hell is going to pay for the government? If you want a functional Social Security and Medicare system, you almost certainly have to eliminate the cap on payroll taxes for rich earners making over $184,500 (while this is a minority or earners who would be impacted, the money we don’t tax above that cap is the majority of the money in our economy). If you want good public schools that are safe and have all the books and teachers they’re supposed to have, you either have to have your property taxes fund most of that at the state level, or you have to explain how you’re going to make up for that money if you eliminate it. Cops, fire fighters, EMTs, and first responders, as well as the equipment they use, cost money. If you like your county nursing home being there as a safety net in your community, you have to understand that federal Medicaid cuts are going to literally kill Northampton and Lehigh County next year (Thank you, Ryan Mackenzie). Basically, if you say you “back the blue,” or “support our troops,” or “want criminals in jail,” or “fix our pot holes,” or “fix our schools”- those things cost money.

We also need to place a lot of the blame on the federal and state governments. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” was a disaster, as were the Bush and Trump tax cuts. We’re basically spending a trillion dollars each on national defense, health care, retirement, and servicing our existing debt, and doing it on less and less real dollars. Washington failed us. Harrisburg has too. Let’s be honest as we go to the polls to re-elect our Governor and give him a Democratic trifecta in two weeks- the “Delaware loop hole” is not closed, we didn’t legalize adult recreational marijuana to create new revenue, we did do a $20 billion deal for data centers that isn’t creating anywhere near enough revenue for the state, and we did these things after a decade where we failed to tax Marcellus Shale even on par with Texas or Oklahoma, when we had the chance- and the results are things like no funding for SEPTA or other government actions we all wanted. Washington failed us. Harrisburg failed us. Maybe the alternatives are worse, both intellectually and personally, but let’s not play blind cheerleader here.

America could have a sane tax system, but it would require a world where every lobbyist hadn’t learned how to use the tax code to generate unheard of wealth for their industries. I get it, that’s their job, but it’s killed us. We could have a system with no write-offs at all, where no one pays on their first $50,000 of income, and then the rates are 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, and 25%, but people actually paid them. We could have a corporate rate of 10% or 15%, with the variable between the two being if the corporation did things we liked, like paying their workers a living wage, not outsourcing jobs, protecting the environment, of offering pensions, and those kinds of actions got them cuts. We could have tax our vices and actually spent less on enforcing morality (softer drugs, booze, gambling) laws and collected more revenue on them. We could have all of that. But in the absence of legislators who do their jobs, what we get is the tax code as the de facto law of the land, deciding the behavior of the public, both rich and poor.

Closer to home, I wonder if the “Zrinski experience” so many executives are going through in the coming years will simply drive people out of politics at the local level? What’s the reward in it? You’re blamed for warehouses, data centers, traffic, elderly folks falling out of bed at the nursing home, staff shortages at the prison, and all sorts of things that you either lack the money to handle, or that some far more famous statewide or national politician forced on you with policy decisions and funding threats from higher government. On some level, we should make things like taxation much cleaner and non-discretionary than it is. Why would any County or local Executive in their right mind authorize a reassessment in their jurisdiction? Let’s be serious, housing goes up as long as the federal tax code and rules for bank lending subsidizes it. So a reassessment is simply a tax increase. It’s literally part of our government system that we agreed upon to make it work, but if it’s something you can “decide” to do or not, you always just decide no. Should elected officials decide when to do reassessment? Probably not. If you make them, it’ll be decades before you see it done again.

Our society is deeply broken because our government is, and has been, deeply broken for a while. We pick that government though. I guess if you vote for someone because they tell you to fear the other guy doing “trans surgery on your kid during the school day,” what do you really expect to get? And don’t think I’m just banging on conservatives here. We have morons on our side suggesting we need riots like France is having, or to just empty out the prisons and eliminate the borders, and dump very expensive people into our citizenry. We are basically choosing here whether to elect a Congressman of questionable moral character who voted to cut our health care, our infrastructure, our first responders, and more, or elect a Congressman of questionable character who decided to not pay to insure his workers while taking tens of thousands of dollars from his in-laws and stiffing them out of the money for two decades. It’s an embarrassment. This is what we’ve got though.