Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanthe
Please, not the "my taxes" argument.  The percentage of your taxes - or my taxes for that matter - that actually buys any books is probably in fractions of cents. You are not actually paying full price for any of those books, no where near. In fact, you probably lose more change from your pocket in a year than you actually contribute to the cost of book purchases. |
I pay hundreds of dollars in library taxes every year - I don't have a quick way of finding out how much, or how much of it is spent on books. But my library's budget is $38 million per year, spread across the population of 800,000 in the county. That works out to $50 per person across the board. But 92% of the funding comes from property taxes, which means that homeowners (especially single homeowners :-() pay a multiple of that. (Renters do indirectly pay some property tax, of course, and 8% of their budget come from a share of local income tax).
But libraries are expensive - I'm kind of happy that more non-library users don't quite realize how much they may be paying.