Nobody asked me, but if members of the Baltimore City Council are shocked that the schools are running up a $60 million budget deficit, then some of them need to be shocked by voters in the next city primary (April 5, 2016).
That said — and it felt good to say so — it's hard to tell exactly what happened here. It could be mismanagement of the budget, poor planning or failure to see a brewing problem. But it could also just be a big bill that resulted from a good idea: finally paying city teachers what they deserve. We are playing catch-up on that count, and it's costly. In fact, we happen to be living in a time when big bills have become due for all manner of things that we — and our parents — neglected or abused.
I don't like paying taxes, and it feels good to say so. Just the other day, I heard what sounded like something I could support, a bill in the General Assembly to establish a statewide ban on plastic shopping bags. It's a worthy effort to eliminate a ubiquitous and unnecessary item from the trash stream. Paper bags would still be available to shoppers.
But the legislation includes a provision to have retailers charge customers 10 cents for paper bags, with seven cents going to the retailer to cover the cost of the bag and three cents going to the state to pay for trash-related programs in Baltimore and the counties. That last part suddenly sounded like a three-cent "bag tax."
Nobody asked me, but the last thing the Maryland environmental movement needs is a good cause associated with anything that smells like a tax. (See "rain tax," the catchy put-down of fees the legislature authorized Baltimore and nine counties to collect to pay for efforts to stem stormwater pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.)
Death and taxes — I'm not crazy about either of them.
But I don't see how we have much choice, especially now.
People who gripe that their taxes are too high seem to lack an awareness of the special time in which we're living. They believe that government just wastes lots of taxpayer money. But those who make that claim usually come up short, way short, when they actually have to pinpoint waste.
There's something else going on, and it shouldn't be news to anyone willing to acknowledge that the government we like to kick around so much actually provides necessary and significant services.
America is well past its adolescence, when it was growing like crazy through the 20th century, two world wars and the baby boom.
But we've hit middle age. Your town, your city, your state, your nation all need more care than they used to.
Whether it's 50-year-old public schools in bad need of repair or replacement; or the endless challenge of educating children, especially those from poor families, in a way that prepares them for lives of success and independence; or the Chesapeake Bay, struggling to come back from two centuries of pollution from industry, agriculture and filthy stormwater; or broken water mains, or cracked bridges. There's no way to have a sustainable future without paying those big bills.
That's part of what is being expressed when people of a certain age tell pollsters they don't expect to attain the same quality of life their parents enjoyed. They know — we all know — we have to pay to clean up the messes others made, to fix the things that have been in decline for decades. The cost of doing so eats away at the concept of progressive generational wealth. It seems overwhelming, even depressing.
But, on the plus side, there's this: What used to be acceptable no longer is. Attitudes have changed. It's not acceptable that children who come up through our public schools are unable to get to college or, once enrolled, fail to get a degree. It's not acceptable that thousands of private-sector jobs in Maryland go unfilled for lack of qualified workers.
Norman Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin who headed a state commission on business, says it's not acceptable that, in one of the wealthiest states in the country, 44 percent of our public school kids qualify for free and reduced lunches because their families are poor. "That's not a formula for success in the long term," Augustine said, emphasizing the need to adequately fund K-through-12 education to address income inequality.
Obviously, schools need to be managed competently, and there needs to be accountability. But no one should be shocked that a turnaround in Baltimore schools requires, for one thing, finally paying teachers at levels that acknowledge their importance.
If we want a cleaner Chesapeake, we pay the "rain tax." If we want bridges that don't crack or collapse, we pay the tolls that support their repair. If we want a modernized municipal water system that functions in a freeze, we have to pay that bill, too. It stinks. But it's the time we're living in, and it's time to pay the bills.
Dan Rodricks' column appears each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He is the host of "Midday" on WYPR-FM.