Tag: taxes

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Editorial Opinion

If It Is Broke, Fix It!

One of the most tiresome aspects of the current political situation in this country is that our two major political parties — which, until quite recently in our history, were aggregates of various constituencies, not ideological monoliths — now oppose each other almost solely on the basis of catechisms.

Nowhere is this more odious than when it comes to dealing with taxes and government expenditures. Everybody on both sides toes a party line. Though few Democrats like to admit it, their party has indeed, as the rival GOP charges, been too dependent on throwing money at intractable social problems. A case in point was the debate in the Tennessee General Assembly this year, in which the Democrats, at Governor Bredesen’s behest, insisted on routing an expected $230 million tobacco-tax windfall into state education. The state House of Representatives’ Republicans proposed a panoply of amendments whereby the money would go to this or that alternative worthy cause — eliminating the sales tax on groceries, for example. Unfortunately, it was generally recognized that the GOP’s strategy was to get the bill amended so it would have to be approved all over again in the Senate — where the Democrats at the time happened to have a couple of absent legislators. Meaning: disapproved. The sad fact is that too many Republicans think no public money is ever required to do anything at all.

Though here and there some brave and independent souls — Democratic state representatives Mike Kernell and Larry Turner of Memphis were two such — broke with party discipline (in their case, to advocate a serious catch-up program in health care), the argument came down to My Pork versus Your Pork. Or more precisely, Pork vs. No Pork. And, nationally as well as statewide, variants of that argument continue on a more or less party-line basis. (See Preston Lauterbach’s “Pork Product?,” on p. 11.)

But maybe the recent bridge catastrophe in Minneapolis will be a prod to both parties, as the Gulf Coast’s devastation by Hurricane Katrina was — or should have been — in 2005.

Unfortunately, not much has been done to amend the still perilous circumstances facing New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf area. The current national administration seems to believe that Katrina was a freak event, not due to be repeated for another thousand years or so. (That’s one thing that comes from a willful disbelief in global warning.)

But, encouragingly, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who only a month ago was basking in the praise of his Republican colleagues for refusing to approve two different tax proposals to fix his state’s aging infrastructure, has experienced a sudden enlightenment as a result of the lethal collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge. “He’s open to that” is what a spokesman for the governor now says about a new tax for repairing infrastructure.

To paraphrase the poet Schiller, he comes late but he comes. Hallelujah! Having just learned from the federal government’s latest National Bridge Inventory that no fewer than 150 bridges right here in Shelby County are adjudged to be either “obsolete or deficient,” we’d just as soon that our own state government rethink its own priorities — free from all the tired old arguments about “pork” and taxation.

We live here, and we happen to think public safety is worth paying for.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

What Gives?

Three members of the Shelby County Commission cast votes Monday for a proposal that may be good politics but makes for unsound public policy. This initiative — for a five-cent across-the-board reduction in the county property tax — came from Wyatt Bunker, who represents the county’s suburban and rural edge and its ideologically conservative edge, as well.

According to Bunker, the proposal, if enacted, would have cut $8 million out of county revenues for the next fiscal year — although the commissioner maintains that such a cut would, sooner or later, raise revenues. Right. The same logic pursued by the relentlessly tax-cutting Bush administration has driven the national deficit to new historical heights.

Various of Bunker’s commission colleagues expressed exasperation with the proposal, especially since A) it came just after a tense debate concerning the commission’s need to divert wheel-tax money originally earmarked as operating funds for the schools into the county’s general fund, where it can be tapped for future capital improvements, and B) it followed weeks of a painstaking budgetary process, now concluded, in which every stray corner of county government was scrutinized for real or potential waste.

Yet, two other commissioners, fellow suburbanite George Flinn and Chairman Joe Ford of Memphis’ inner city, joined with Bunker in voting for the proposal which, had it passed, would have thrown county government back to square one in its financial planning for the next cycle.

What gives? Well, the legitimate needs of the taxpayers would have been first. As several commissioners pointed out, the needs of the schools would have come asunder, closely followed by law enforcement. It made a certain political sense for Bunker and Flinn to vote the way they did, since they represent (or believe they represent) constituents who favor tax cuts at all costs. But what was Chairman Ford, who normally balances policy and service needs with the legitimate requirements of fiscal solvency, thinking?

Ford, who must have known the discussion and the vote were pro forma, urged Bunker to reintroduce the proposal next year. Fair enough. At least that will give the commission enough lead time to reorganize fiscal priorities so as to facilitate such an across-the-board cut, if that’s what they regard as needful. Given Governor Bredesen’s success in imposing drastic cuts when he took office in 2003, we’re not saying the idea of an across-the-board cut is impossible. But the last time we looked, the governor was taking some criticism of policy changes (his gutting of TennCare, for example) that we regard as legitimate.

Property owners are surely entitled to relief and deserve consideration of the sort just awarded in Nashville, where state senator Mark Norris and state representative John DeBerry won passage of legislation authorizing the state’s local governments to enact limited tax freezes for seniors.

Those eligible in Shelby County are homeowners at least 65 years old with incomes not exceeding $31,549. That amounts to 59 percent of the county’s senior households and is consistent with Shelby County’s unique need for balance between revenues and services. When it can, the commission should act upon the new law. Anything more drastic will have to wait.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Tax Season

“I hate to be the one to remind you, but pretty soon it’s going to be April 15th — tax time. You know what I am saying? Are you ready? Well, you know when something like this happens, New Yorkers always try to put the best face they can on a situation. For example, the hookers in Times Square: For an extra $50, they will handle your extension.” — David Letterman

The best part of spring just ended — the NCAA basketball championship and the Masters. Now comes the bad part — pollen and tax time. This year, we are measuring pollen by the inch here in Atlanta, but it is not near as annoying to me as paying this idiotic government’s ever-increasing taxes.

April 15th is when people like Kevin Federline have to answer awkward questions like “Occupation?” George Bush should have to answer a similar question: “Why Occupation?” (In the most expensive political/social-science course of all time, we have spent $500 billion just so our government could learn that Shiites and Sunnis will never ever get along.)

The Republicans, who say they are the party of limited government, created the second-largest entitlement of all time with the prescription-drug-coverage giveaway. As it turns out, the giveaway was mostly to drug companies who, through spending a ton of money on lobbying Congress, do not have to compete on prices any longer. The drug lobby actually hired the congressman who ran this bill through Congress — right after it passed — and is paying him $2 million a year. I need a Prozac.

With all their goof-ups and lack of truth in advertising, the GOP has left the door open for the classic tax-and-spenders, the Democrats. It is a given that we are not going to get a tax break under Hillary Clinton, who has already picked out her inaugural pantsuit, she is so sure she will win in 2008. Her Thighness will not be concerned about the high taxes we pay. She only wants to raise taxes and redirect the money.

And there will be more gas taxes, created by Democrats out to stop the bogeyman called Global Warming. Currently, the villains — oil companies — make about 10 cents a gallon profit on gas. The government takes about 40 cents a gallon. Expect that to get worse. It will drive me nuts when the Democrats take charge. I fear that I may get suicidal and throw myself under an oncoming glacier.

The federal budget is more screwed up than Paris Hilton’s checkbook. We have an incomprehensible, lobbyist-written tax code that costs us $195 billion a year to comply with. Many in our society, of course, do not pay anything.

The top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for 37 percent of all taxes paid in 2005, up from 34 percent in 2003. The top 5 percent of taxpayers, those with around $130,000 and above in income, paid 57 percent of all collected taxes. The bottom 50 percent paid only 3 percent. I find it amazing that people think that somehow upper-income people are not paying their fair share. My fear is that they will leave the country and stop supporting the rest of the United States.

The only answer is the “fair tax.” It abolishes the IRS and collects tax at the point of sale. The IRS has a 10-billion-dollar budget and four times as many employees as the FBI. If the fair tax gets enacted, we would no longer have to file tax returns. Only the IRS could devise a system whereby we are forced to predict how much tax we owe by guessing how many dependents we should deduct. Somehow, the government views children as deductions, while most of us who are parents view them as taxing.

As for me, I am just going to claim one dependent this year: the U.S. government.

Ron Hart is a libertarian and an investor who lives in Atlanta. His e-mail is RevRon10@aol.com.