Friday, May 09, 2008
HANG THE TAX-CUTTERS
“Hang the tax-cutters!” “Throw the rascals out!”
Such should be the election year slogans of all knowledgeable voting citizens who care about the quality of state and local government services.
While the most vigorous and mean tax-cutters are within the leadership group of one political party, there are those frightened sycophants in the other party who are afraid to stand up and be statesmanlike in the face of the evils of tax-cutting. Too often they just go along.
“Nail the tax-dodgers!”
This, too, would be an appropriate election year slogan for those who are informed about how much and how many special interests are exempt from taxes – both state and local, or property and sales.
The unneeded give-away of $30 million in state tax exemptions for the multi-millionaire owners of the new Oklahoma City basketball team is the latest example of squandering by legislators of both parties. The sales tax holiday is another. There are numerous other examples of such in the name of “quality jobs.”
Tax breaks for oil and gas companies to encourage new or deeper drilling are a sham, suspected of being bought and paid for with campaign donations. Who’s hurt? State services suffer.
Millions of dollars are unavailable to schools, as well as financially strapped city and county governments, because of property tax exemptions for as much as 15 years for new or expanded business facilities. Again, this is in the name of jobs or economic development. Few even question these.
Jobs and economic development have become the sacred cows of state politics.
Cutting individual income tax rates, reducing corporate rates, and abolishing inheritance taxes on huge estates have hurt every consumer of state services. The benefits go to a relative few.
Unable to find “the fat in the state budget” as advertised in past campaigns, the republicans at the state level appear to have adopted their national posture of “cut taxes, borrow, and spend.”
Failure to enact gasoline and diesel taxes to keep up with surrounding states has caused Oklahoma to adopt a dangerous, and constitutionally questionable, practice of borrowing for highway dollars and paying them back with interest from regular income later. Highway backers now want to take money away from schools, because we are way behind.
Further, the legislature has put the state into billions of dollars of debt by failure to fund state and college building bonds by enacting a special tax for payback as the constitution requires. They are now floating bonds for matching donated endowed chair funds, primarily for OU and OSU, by taking away dedicated funding for their own OHLAP student scholarship program benefiting students of all colleges.
The legislature shucked its responsibility for student fees, letting regents raise these exorbitantly to compensate for failure to fund colleges. Thus, the legislature is secretly taxing families of college kids.
Debt obligations against future income are growing, removing an increasing amount of current income as a budget source.
The legislature plays hypocritical games with the penal system – enacting strict laws and sentencing rules while ignoring the consequences in terms of numbers and costs of incarceration. Unfunded debt is used to expand the system, or more private contract prisons are brought into use at added budget expense.
By failing to properly fund the state’s education and other retirement funds on a pay as you go basis, the legislature has allowed the state to accumulate liability that will take twenty years or more to pay off. These, plus the unfunded bonds enacted upon legislative whim, will end up destroying the credit rating of the state and make borrowing more expensive.
Orphans and children from broken and hazardous homes are being warehoused in overflowing facilities because money has not been provided for more foster home care. Juvenile offender detention centers are over-populated and dangerous places. Basic home health care for the elderly is not being funded, causing removal of some elderly ill to nursing homes at more than twice the cost.
Our legislature has performed with all the fiscal restraint of a drunken sailor on shore leave, or a college kid with no credit card limit. They run up debt without increasing income. (Perhaps this comparison denigrates the college kids and my former navy shipmates.)
Surely voters can recognize that the major fiscal problems that Oklahoma state and local governments face result from: (1) the unwillingness of its own citizens, corporate and individual, to pay taxes to support quality, even necessary, public services; and (2) the willingness of spineless legislators to assertively do the bidding of the their most selfish and least publicly responsible constituents.
On the other hand, it could be worse. What if it were just ignorance and stupidity?
Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate
Such should be the election year slogans of all knowledgeable voting citizens who care about the quality of state and local government services.
While the most vigorous and mean tax-cutters are within the leadership group of one political party, there are those frightened sycophants in the other party who are afraid to stand up and be statesmanlike in the face of the evils of tax-cutting. Too often they just go along.
“Nail the tax-dodgers!”
This, too, would be an appropriate election year slogan for those who are informed about how much and how many special interests are exempt from taxes – both state and local, or property and sales.
The unneeded give-away of $30 million in state tax exemptions for the multi-millionaire owners of the new Oklahoma City basketball team is the latest example of squandering by legislators of both parties. The sales tax holiday is another. There are numerous other examples of such in the name of “quality jobs.”
Tax breaks for oil and gas companies to encourage new or deeper drilling are a sham, suspected of being bought and paid for with campaign donations. Who’s hurt? State services suffer.
Millions of dollars are unavailable to schools, as well as financially strapped city and county governments, because of property tax exemptions for as much as 15 years for new or expanded business facilities. Again, this is in the name of jobs or economic development. Few even question these.
Jobs and economic development have become the sacred cows of state politics.
Cutting individual income tax rates, reducing corporate rates, and abolishing inheritance taxes on huge estates have hurt every consumer of state services. The benefits go to a relative few.
Unable to find “the fat in the state budget” as advertised in past campaigns, the republicans at the state level appear to have adopted their national posture of “cut taxes, borrow, and spend.”
Failure to enact gasoline and diesel taxes to keep up with surrounding states has caused Oklahoma to adopt a dangerous, and constitutionally questionable, practice of borrowing for highway dollars and paying them back with interest from regular income later. Highway backers now want to take money away from schools, because we are way behind.
Further, the legislature has put the state into billions of dollars of debt by failure to fund state and college building bonds by enacting a special tax for payback as the constitution requires. They are now floating bonds for matching donated endowed chair funds, primarily for OU and OSU, by taking away dedicated funding for their own OHLAP student scholarship program benefiting students of all colleges.
The legislature shucked its responsibility for student fees, letting regents raise these exorbitantly to compensate for failure to fund colleges. Thus, the legislature is secretly taxing families of college kids.
Debt obligations against future income are growing, removing an increasing amount of current income as a budget source.
The legislature plays hypocritical games with the penal system – enacting strict laws and sentencing rules while ignoring the consequences in terms of numbers and costs of incarceration. Unfunded debt is used to expand the system, or more private contract prisons are brought into use at added budget expense.
By failing to properly fund the state’s education and other retirement funds on a pay as you go basis, the legislature has allowed the state to accumulate liability that will take twenty years or more to pay off. These, plus the unfunded bonds enacted upon legislative whim, will end up destroying the credit rating of the state and make borrowing more expensive.
Orphans and children from broken and hazardous homes are being warehoused in overflowing facilities because money has not been provided for more foster home care. Juvenile offender detention centers are over-populated and dangerous places. Basic home health care for the elderly is not being funded, causing removal of some elderly ill to nursing homes at more than twice the cost.
Our legislature has performed with all the fiscal restraint of a drunken sailor on shore leave, or a college kid with no credit card limit. They run up debt without increasing income. (Perhaps this comparison denigrates the college kids and my former navy shipmates.)
Surely voters can recognize that the major fiscal problems that Oklahoma state and local governments face result from: (1) the unwillingness of its own citizens, corporate and individual, to pay taxes to support quality, even necessary, public services; and (2) the willingness of spineless legislators to assertively do the bidding of the their most selfish and least publicly responsible constituents.
On the other hand, it could be worse. What if it were just ignorance and stupidity?
Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate
