The people pick up the tab.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT - Tax policy - Viewpoint essay

Everyone has a fuse, and when lit that fuse can ignite an extended rant on whichever subject an individual holds dear in his or her lockbox of rage. I am the possessor of several fuses--which explains why I don't get invited to many parties--and here's one of them: the widely misunderstood concept of public money, which apparently confuses the gatekeepers of news, an uncountable number of bureaucrats, more than a few academics and even most members of the very public whose money is routinely shanghaied by the people who tell them it wasn't really their money in the first place.

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That list of groups, by the way, reflects a descending order of blame. The public gets a pass because most of us subscribe to the naive belief (nurtured by politicians) that the taxes we pay are the only "public money." In contrast, journalists know better--or at least they should--and hence get most of the blame for letting the routine appropriation of public money go unchallenged. I'll cite three examples from the past year. Once you understand what I'm talking about, you'll notice that it goes on all the time.

The first example dates back to Christmas '09, when Gov. Beverly Perdue hosted a holiday party for the 20 or so prison inmates who work in and around the Executive Mansion. Both the Raleigh News & Observer and WTVD television in Durham reported on the event, and both found it necessary to point out that taxpayers didn't foot the bill for the party. As the N&O explained: "The event didn't cost taxpayers anything. During the year, the mansion is available for private receptions and fees from those events paid for the party."

The only problem with that chirpy reassurance is that the Executive Mansion is, as the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources proclaims on its website, "the people's house." It belongs to the taxpayers, regardless of whoever lives in it or maintains it (which happens to be the Executive Mansion Fine Arts Committee, a creation of the General Assembly). What that means, of course, is that any fees generated by private events at the mansion also belong to taxpayers. So, yeah, we did pay for the inmates' holiday hullabaloo. That's OK with me--I don't mind picking up the tab for some nonalcoholic eggnog for the prison work crew--but it's alarming that our guardians in the media don't challenge politicians every time one of them asserts that funds that come to the state from a source other than a direct tax payment somehow...