AUSTIN — Though city hall was outwardly adorned early Tuesday morning with fresh communist propaganda, local officials inside the building have already been enacting a similar harmful leftist ideology on Austinites for many years.
Overnight Monday, vandals threw red paint all over the front doors of Austin City Hall and spray-painted two messages on the white stone building: “MAY 1 INTERNATIONAL WORKERS DAY,” complete with a hammer and sickle image, and “U.S. IMPERIALISM IS THE VIRUS. SOCIALIST REVOLUTION IS THE CURE!”
Ironically, the Austin City Council has already been practicing far-left principles for many years.
Over the past decade, the city council has constantly taken more money away from working-class citizens—in fact, compared to 12 years ago, they’re now taking 100 percent more from the median homeowner (the median property tax bill in 2008 was $705, now it’s over $1,400).
The city council also wildly spends those truckloads of citizens’ cash, and they spend roughly double the money per citizen than city governments in Dallas or Houston.
For example, the council spent $115,000 to clean one public toilet, $156,000 on holiday parties just last December (more than Dallas and Houston combined), $450,000 to buy two public toilets, $140 million over budget on a flawed tunnel project, and $1 billion on an ill-advised biomass power plant disaster that produced energy for only six months and has since been shut down.
There are also the millions that city council gave away to citizens who simply emailed the city asking for cash, or the city hall’s artist-in-residence program, where they employ artists to simply provide “out-of-the-box” thinking.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
In short, the city council takes a lot from citizens and spends it like a South Padre partier on spring break.
Though all of the city council members are Democrats, one is a self-proclaimed socialist. Greg Casar, a “proud member” of the Democratic Socialists of America, has constantly voted to take more money away from working-class citizens. He has not publicly commented on the vandalism by the members of his own ideological group.
And what have the council’s runaway tax-and-spend decisions done to working-class Austinites? They’ve forced many out of the city.
“When I bought this house 22 years ago, my property taxes were [roughly] $2,800 a year, which was doable,” said homeowner Brendan Sipple. “Now, they are $9,000.”
Sipple, a single father in north Austin, says that because local governments have cleaned out his wallet, he soon might not be able to afford his own home.
“It does worry me. I think about it all the time,” he said. “At what point do I say I can’t do it anymore?”
A recent report by United Way detailed how Sipple is far from alone. According to the analysis, an astonishing 42 percent of Austin families are now struggling to pay their bills.
“These are people who are working hard and working full-time,” said David C. Smith, president of the United Way for Greater Austin. “They’re just still barely getting by and struggling.”
Even worse, the Austin City Council hasn’t just looted families, but iconic businesses too. Just in the past two years, the council has been instrumental in forcing more than 50 downtown local businesses to close; many were culture-defining establishments, including Threadgill’s World Headquarters, The Frisco, and Hill’s Café.
Curiously, mainstream news outlet CBS reported Tuesday the socialist vandals wrote “pro-worker” messages on city hall.
Yet given the real-world havoc from the council’s leftist actions, the actual workers themselves might disagree.
Well, at least the ones who are still left in the city.
