The mission of the Public Safety Project™ is to perform research, analysis, and public education to assist public officials, public figures, educators, news organizations, and the public in promoting the most effective and efficient public safety policies and rejecting counter-productive policies and practices. The mission also includes promoting limited, efficient, affordable, sustainable, and responsive government to ensure high quality public safety, stability, peace and tranquility, and a free society with respect for property rights, the free market, and individual liberties.
Effective public safety policies necessarily include the prevention of fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer money because the public resources and the ability of the taxpayers to fund government are finite and limited. One method to encourage government to become and remain efficient, and to ensure that government lives within the means of the taxpayers, is to limit taxation and government spending to fair and reasonable levels in a free society.
Failure to achieve and maintain efficient, affordable, and sustainable government can lead to bankruptcy at all levels of government, resulting in a breakdown of society, instability, and loss or degradation of emergency and essential services.
Government, politicians, and government employee unions cannot rely on unlimited tax increases to pay for their fiscal irresponsibility, lavish Royal Family compensation packages and pensions, and buying of votes and political campaign support with taxpayers’ money. Often, one million tax dollars or more extra per year are given in exchange for every thousand dollars in campaign contributions, resulting in a 1000-to-1 or higher compression ratio of taxpayers’ money.
The Laffer Curve, named after economist Arthur Laffer, shows there is a revenue-maximizing tax rate. Tax revenues are zero at the zero percent tax rate, increase as the tax rate increases to the revenue-maximizing tax rate, peak at the revenue-maximizing tax rate, and then decline with further tax rate increases until tax revenues become zero at the 100 percent tax rate. Historical economic data confirms the Laffer Curve. The Laffer Curve should be applied to the effective tax rate of all taxes combined.
The Laffer Curve illustrates how tax rates and tax revenues are dynamic rather than static, due to changes in behavior and in the viability of businesses and investments when tax rates increase, especially when tax rates become burdensome and Draconian. Thus, the common predictions that a given percentage tax rate increase will result in a corresponding tax revenue increase based on a linear scale model are inaccurate, unrealistic, and exceedingly optimistic or outright dishonest.
The effective tax rate of all taxes combined should never exceed the revenue-maximizing tax rate, because it harms the economy, reduces productivity, increases unemployment, reduces tax revenues, and punishes and discourages productivity, innovation, investment, and employment.
However, the revenue-maximizing tax rate in the Laffer Curve, which is the effective rate of all taxes combined, is substantially higher than the maximum permissible Moral Tax Rate for all taxes combined in a free society. Tax rates in a free society should not be set to maximize tax revenues, but only to a lesser moral rate sufficient to support a minimal government that does not exceed its constitutionally authorized powers and responsibilties.
Government, unlike businesses and individuals, has police powers that enable it to legally use confiscation of property, imprisonment, and violent and deadly force, if necessary, to coerce the citizens into paying taxes.
Part of the mission of the Public Safety Project is to address the inherent and unavoidable conflict of interest that exists when government employees, especially sworn firefighters and police officers who hold positions of authority and public trust, are allowed to unionize and engage in “collective bargaining” (often, collective corruption and collective extortion) with public officials they helped to elect and that they can just as easily help to un-elect at the next election.
Government employees are entitled to their First Amendment Free Speech rights and cannot be prevented from participating in election campaigns. Therefore, the only solution to prevent ultimate bankruptcy at all levels of government is to repeal the laws that allowed government employees to unionize and engage in collective bargaining, dramatically tilting the playing field in their favor and against the voters and taxpayers.
Another part of the mission of the Public Safety Project is to promote real and effective Redistricting Reform to eliminate gerrymandering. Under gerrymandering, we have taxation without representation, wasteful government spending, and other abuses of government powers. Gerrymandering manipulates election district boundary lines to create safe, non-competitive election districts where the incumbents are guaranteed re-election. Under gerrymandering, the politicians can cater to labor unions and other special interests, and ignore the voters and taxpayers with impunity.
Citizens redistricting commissions and redistricting panels of active or retired judges are not viable solutions, because they still result in gerrymanders.
The most effective approach to real Redistricting Reform is to use a computer program to create maximally compact election districts based on accurate legal population counts. This computer software approach to drawing election district maps eliminates human bias and errors.
The redistricting program should consist entirely of free open-source software, written in a widespread standard programming language such as C or C++. The program source code and population data should be freely available over the Internet for inspection, testing, and verification by everyone.
Accurate legal population counts necessarily include American citizens and legal permanent residents, and exclude illegal aliens, foreign country embassy and government personnel, and visiting students, business employees, and tourists on visas. Counting illegal aliens violates the one voter-one vote principle because some election districts have half or a third the legal population of other districts for the same legislative body.
El Segundo Police Officers' Association (ESPOA) Exposed