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Every trade or profession, I suppose, attempts to force
its preferred vocabulary upon the rest of us. Sometimes
this is easy to understand, as with the politicians
who prefer to be known as public servants,
or
newspaper hacks
who would rather be called
journalists.
But some euphemisms seem rather mysterious. When I
edited the local paper 15 years ago, we had a local
undertaker (he wanted to be a funeral director,
of
course) who protested every time we used pallbearer
instead of casketbearer
in an obituary.
I couldn't understand why casketbearer
had become
the preferred term in our American way of death, and when I
asked the undertaker, I just heard that's what we're
supposed to use now.
Well, they could use any jargon they wanted in their
trade publications, but at the newspaper, we tried to stick
with plain English -- died
instead of passed
away,
death
rather than eternal repose,
committed suicide
as opposed to died
suddenly,
etc.
Embalmers and undertakers are notorious for their love
of euphemism, but they have plenty of company. The other
day I read about an upscale shopping mall proposed for
Broomfield, and the developer wanted to call it a retail
experience.
I tried to imagine future conversations along the Front Strange:
Want to go to the Flatirons Crossing Retail
Experience with us?
I can't. I already promised I'd go to Loveland with
the neighbors for the Sam's Club Wholesale Experience, and
afterward we might drive up to Estes Park and for the Tacky
Tourist Trap Rubber Tomahawk Stand Experience.
Maybe we could get together afterward in Lyons for an
Expensive Dinner Experience or head for Longmont and the
Dragging Main Street Experience.
Perhaps I misunderstood the developer dialect. It could be that if you're getting experiences in small doses, say by loitering out on a small-town street corner, that's a Retail Experience, but if you're at an amusement park, you get a Wholesale Experience.
At any rate, I noticed another experience
in that
shopping-mall article -- something that even we Salidans
have experience with, namely using tax money to subsidize
private companies.
The road and sewer improvements for Broomfield's
proposed Flatiron Crossing mall will cost $79 million. The
developer will pay that up front -- as we often hear,
growth should pay its own way.
But then the city will repay the developer, with interest, from the mall's sales-tax revenues. In other words, sales-tax income that was supposed to benefit the entire community will finance the infrastructure that the mall needed.
The argument for this sort of subsidy is that if we
don't do it, then some other town will, and we won't get
the jobs and tax revenue.
That's pretty much the same
argument that American companies used years ago, when
Congress outlawed paying bribes to foreign government
officials.
The same sort of thing happened in Salida when Wal-Mart proposed an superstore a couple of years ago. A water main had to be extended, and supposedly the city would recover those costs from increased sales-tax revenue.
In the spirit of euphemism, these transactions here are
not called taking money from people making $18,000 a
year and giving it to the world's largest retail
corporation
or paying growth's way.
Instead, such deals go by names like tax-increment
financing
and public-private partnerships.
And
I suspect the same is true for Broomfield and its Retail
Experience.
There's probably no way to stop our reverse-Robin-Hood local governments from stealing from the poor to give to the rich, but perhaps the legislature, at some future session, could enact a law which at least provides for public notice.
A billboard would have to be erected at each entrance to any of these developments, and it would have to list the subsidies and other pertinent information, as with:
This Wal-Mart Superstore made possible by a $300,000
grant from the water fund of the City of Salida, whose
residents make about two-thirds of the national median
income. Wal-Mart reported gross earnings of $2.1 billion
last year.
Or perhaps This McDonald's erected with tax-free
Colorado Enterprise Zone Industrial Revenue Bonds
subsidized by the 3.2 million people of Colorado.
McDonald's reported gross earnings of $1.2 billion last
year, and the average franchise owner makes $95,000 a year,
more than twice the median Colorado household
income.
Call it the Colorado Fully Informed Subsidy Law,
and it should pass with little opposition. After all, if
these deals are good deals for us, all parties involved
should want to brag on them, right?
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