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Republicans that run our state government are hypocrites. Their stated motivations for creating the city of Sandy Springs was to let local communities have more local control over the revenue generated by the tax payers there. They said they believed that you should not transfer money from communities that generate it to poorer communities that didn’t…So long as you don’t apply that logic to transportation funding or anything having to do with Alcohol taxes.

Georgia State University research shows that the big 5 metro counties make up over 24 percent of the state’s gas tax revenue, yet they get nothing like that in terms of the investment in transportation infrastructure. It’s so bad that the Metro Chamber of Commerce thinks that Metro Atlanta should be able to create its own self taxing district to raise the revenue to fix their transportation needs.

The same is true for liquor revenue. Fulton, Dekalb, Gwinnett, and Cobb produce well over 20% of all the alcohol taxes and that money does not end up back in those counties. Heck, the Governor has promised to veto a bill which would let those counties sell beer and wine on Sunday.

So what is it about? They don’t want things to go well for those living in the blue parts of the state. They are afraid that if the blue areas of the state (And if you think that Cobb and Gwinnett are still solid red counties think again) get to control their money, drink, and build good transit systems, people there will be happier and they won’t be willing to live the red state, Sam’s Club, SUV way. The people might discover the power of the community and turn the Reds out of power.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Politics, as Usual. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.