Every tax is a pay cut.  Every tax cut is a pay raise.
Citizens for Limited Taxation

Trash column misses point Friday, November 14, 2003
Steve W. Orr Metrowest Daily News
Mr. Holmes' column of Sunday, Nov. 9 misses the mark completely. The issue has nothing to do with whether pay-as-you-throw is good or bad.

It has everything to do with whether or not we should pay twice to have our trash picked up.  With an already-defined annual budget, we are exposed to having to buy trash stickers on top of the taxes we already pay for trash pickup.  Wouldn't it be fair to lower the taxes by the amount that we collect in trash stickers?

Mr. Holmes suggests that we could all take our trash to the dump ourselves.  But one of the points of government is to provide service that is inherently clumsy for the homeowner to provide for himself.  The cost to our society for all of us to individually take our trash to the dump would be far greater in time, money, manpower and fossil fuel resources than it would be for it to be picked up by a centralized service.  And the disposal costs would remain.  Some towns have a system where each person takes his own trash to the dump, but those towns tend to be much smaller.

Here, in a town the size of Framingham, the disadvantages are much more obvious.  The further danger of moving to a PAYT system that only requires a sticker for a second bag of trash is that the private homeowner is no longer given the option of paying for an outside contractor to have his trash picked up.  We don't want our trash picked up for free;  we just want our trash to be picked up with the funds that were allocated for that purpose.  If our trash is not going to be picked up with that money, then give us our money back.

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