Why tax millionaires when we can just write more parking tickets?

Who knew? For weeks now, Philadelphia has watched its six or seven mayoral candidates hold three or four debates every day (it least it feels that way, doesn't it?), hemming and hawing their way through their rehearsed, half-baked answers to the only question voters really care about: How are you going to pay for the city's perpetually broke public schools?

The real solution may be is easier than we thought.

If every resident of the city and a few visiting suburbanites would just go out and park in front of a fire hydrant maybe once a week or so, we could probably close the Philadelphia School District's budget gap, maybe even go crazy and hire a school nurse or buy a few American history textbooks written after the Truman administration.

OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But this week we learned that the administration is very worried about a new plan to use cellphone apps and 21st Century technology to let motorists legally extend their stay in a city parking place. You don't get a parking ticket, and the much-maligned Philadelphia Parking Authority gets the added income from your business. Everybody wins!

Except the kids. Turns out there's a twist to our old-fashioned, 20th-Century way of doing things, when you get socked with a hefty ticket when your meeting runs over or a game goes into overtime and you can't get to your car to put more coin in the meter (or kiosk). Some of that fine money helps to finance, however meagerly, Philadelphia public schools.

"At a time when we are struggling to make sure the schools have the resources that we need, we need to make sure that we're not digging ourselves deeper in a hole," Andrew Stober, chief of staff for the mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities, told the Inquirer about the new plan. It turns out that fines are a healthy chunk of the $9.7 million that the cash-starved schools got from the Parking Authority last year.

Look, this isn't a big piece of the school district's budget or its ongoing crisis -- right now there's an $80 million budget gap -- but it does reflect a troubling trend: The nickeling and diming of America...anything to avoid an actual fair tax system to pay for government services. Luckily, Philadelphia isn't (yet) Ferguson, Missouri, where after last summer's unrest it was revealed that fines and court costs were the second biggest source of city revenue, and that cash seemed to fuel the town's aggressive policing.

The Nutter administration's fears that you might now stop getting parking tickets seem a step down that slippery slope. Of course, City Hall is probably even more panicked over suggestions by the likes of mayoral candidate Nelson Diaz to at least modify the 10-year tax abatements -- which now include school taxes -- that go to Center City developers. The millions in tax breaks that now support projects like the Comcast Center, which houses the mega-profitable largest cable company in America, dwarf what the schools get when you park too far from the curb.

But any form of corporate welfare is a sacred cow these days. Just recently, we saw again Harrisburg flooded with applications from millionaire developers like Philadelphia's Bart Blatstein for economic development grants that usually total about $200 million a year that the state doles out because...remind me again why these are doled out. I guess "free market capitalism" isn't really free. You'd think that an oppressive "big government" looking for any excuse to write you a ticket and the legal tax evasion of the wealthy could be a cause to unites conservatives and liberals.

I mean, you'd think.

But for now handouts keep flowing even as the sins of the middle class -- drinking, smoking and overtime parking -- can never be taxed enough. And what a message that send to the children of Philadelphia, that their future means more to us than...our desire for people to park legally.