Last week I received a check from my bank, a refund from the escrow account from which the bank pays my property taxes. It was a significant amount of money—at least in the eyes of a journalist (There’s a very good reason my profession is referred to as the Fourth Estate). At first I was excited—I’ve had some medical issues this year, so a few bills are going to get paid earlier, which will get my doctors excited. The bank wasn’t sure why the surplus existed—it could have been that the taxes were over-estimated when I bought the house last year. Or it could be that the taxes have dropped, perhaps because the value of my property has dropped.

I thought about the latter possibility. If my taxes have dropped because my property value has diminished, presumably as a result of the lending fiasco, then others—perhaps thousands of others—are in the same boat. Also, consumers are tightening the belt, spending less in stores, restaurants, entertainment venues and the like. That means less sales tax revenue. None of this bodes well for first-responder communications, which is largely dependent on funding generated from tax dollars.