City of Kennesaw Elections-Part 1
by PV
Last week, we issued a Poll to the Vine readership consisting of this one question: ” If a person running for public office has a bankruptcy of any type in their background, should it be disclosed?”
Out of 142 votes cast, 111 voted “Yes, it should be disclosed” and 32 voted “No, I don’t care to know.”
There was an opportunity for people to give their own insight into the subject, and the personal opinions ran the gamut (see here for opinions…by the way, the site that the Poll is on is not controlled by Political Vine in any way, and it will not be monitored).
In reviewing these opinions, as well as consulting with other people in the world of politics, we’ve come to the following conclusions about bankruptcies (you are free to disagree):
1) Not all bankruptcies are the result of a character flaw in the people who file. It does not mean the person is immoral or unethical for filing a bankruptcy (of course, if any US Senator from Georgia ever files for bankruptcy, we’ll be scratching our heads and wondering why they didn’t get enough ROI from their crony capitalist bank pals after they voted in 2005 to give the homeowner less of a chance for recovery, all the while giving more power and absolution to the banks themselves).
2) Not all bankruptcies are entirely the fault of the person or business making the filing.
3) Barring the actual attempt to defraud, defaulting on money owed to creditors is not a sign of anyone who is being inherently dishonest (the creditors voluntarily took a risk to give credit to the borrower…that is an agreement between two private parties as far as we are concerned and a happenstance of the free market).
4) However, if the person has defaulted on taxes owed to a government entity, AND….that person is a candidate for a publicly-elected office for some position at some level of government, then everyone’s pretty much in agreement that that is a sign of hypocrisy present that is not going to be tolerated for very long by the voters and taxpayers.
It is this 4th point that is crucial to understand why there’s “hypocrisy” if someone is elected to office who hasn’t paid their own tax bills. It is the reason why we felt it was necessary to expose, not only the $137,000 some-odd of current tax liens that HD 43 candidate Robert Lamutt had on his current books, but also his documented 7-year history of having liens at both the federal and state level field against him that made it relevant.
When you are elected to public office, you are, in effect, using the force of government to extract tax dollars from us to pay for your fiefdom.
And, unless you think, as an elected official, that you should be exempt from paying taxes to support your infrastructure, your failure to pay taxes means that the burden must fall on the rest of the taxpayers.
And, taxpayers don’t particularly care to shoulder your load while you are put in charge of making decisions on how to spend their money.
