Much of the hissing and spitting that passes for civic debate in this age orbits around cries of “job-killing” this or “job-creating” that. Which provides an interesting lens through which to view the upcoming regional transportation referendum.
We suggest that opponents of the Transportation Investment Act penny sales tax listen to a new advertising blitz with something close to an open mind.
Critics also owe it to themselves and their communities, in our view, to examine the sponsor list for the expected $8 million campaign of choir-preaching that points out yet again our epic mobility problems and the need to start addressing them.
The backers of this metro marketing blitz are not big-government supporters eager to expand the public trough. Nowhere near it.
Rather, it is businesses large and small — the job creators themselves — who’ve put dollars and muscle into supporting the only option now on the table to begin fixing our world-famous transportation mess.
Executives and entrepreneurs are not generally given to a love of taxes, especially new ones. So what does the private sector see here that some of us don’t, at least not yet?
An answer comes by considering just how desperate our transportation morass must be to push cost-sensitive, profit-driving businesspeople to back a mechanism whereby voters would be asked to approve a tax increase for transportation work.
In a global capitalistic arena, what rational business operator would, in effect, embrace hiking the cost of their products by a penny on the dollar, only to see that money flow immediately into government coffers?
The answer shouldn’t surprise, and the underlying calculus is simple, if somewhat serpentine. Adding a penny of tax is readily noticeable and an easy target for resentment by anyone paying it. What’s less visible on the cost ledger, but no less real, are the billions of dollars that congestion leaches from this region’s productivity. It happens in many ways. Fuel wastefully burned by thousands of trucks that are too-often idling in gridlock, rather than rolling productively. The squandering of time and money that occurs when salespeople are routinely late for appointments, or when medical workers kill time while patients struggle through traffic to appointments.
Unlike an additional penny of sales tax, the above cost examples are deceptively hard to detect and quantify.
Yet, they are most assuredly there. Atlantans intuitively know that. We live it. We feel the crimp both in our wallets and our lifestyles.
And, taking a broad view, this business stronghold feels it through lessened economic competitiveness. Businesspeople understand competition — it’s in part why they focus on running as lean a shop as possible and freeing the savings for productive uses that will help them win the next contract, the next sale. That’s what grows jobs.
Fostering that sort of commerce is what Atlanta Inc. once did better than almost anyplace else. Our transportation system worked in our favor then.
That’s no longer true. Competitor cities have built furiously while we sat in traffic. They’ve hewed infrastructure from concrete and steel. New, or expanded, roadways. Transit lines running on rubber or steel wheels. Our rivals get it, in states both red and blue.
And if we don’t get that message here, we will have hobbled our own ability to manufacture economic growth and jobs going forward. No amount of idle speechifying over jobs can counteract the strategic mistake of our inaction if that happens.
Our business community has seen that risk — and the threat it poses to their own enterprises and to our community at large. That’s why they’re supporting the education campaign for the TIA, the voter drive that’s to come, or both.
These efforts are worthwhile. And our job creators’ keen instincts in this regard should be heeded in the days leading up to the July 31 vote.
Andre Jackson, for the Editorial Board
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