For the week of November 4 thru November 10, 1998  

Promises, promises

Commentary by PAT MURPHY


The good news: Election Day has come and gone.

The bad news: winners now can begin ignoring their promises.

It’s a tribute to the shamelessness of many politicians and their Dr. Frankensteins who brew up flimflam campaign themes that they try conning voters year after year, and a melancholy tribute to voter innocence, ignorance or indifference that they swallow the scam year after year.

One enduring myth returns every election season, like a vampire that won’t die.

The issue of taxes.

It was central to the campaign bravado of Idaho’s Richard Stallings and Mike Simpson for a congressional seat, as well as elsewhere around the country.

The gambit is this: Candidate Virtue accuses Candidate Evil of raising taxes, inferring that Candidate Virtue will have no part in raising taxes.

So, by that line of political logic, the federal government should operate without raising taxes, even as the budget soars into the trillions.

Ipso facto, the few simple taxes devised by the Founding Fathers more than 200 years ago should be the only taxes now on the books, since no virtuous congressman worth anything would ever increase taxes, nor, as Candidate Virtue drones on and on, are tax increases even needed.

So, how come the 1 percent income tax of the 1930s has skyrocketed? How come payroll taxes for Social Security have increased? How come the 5-cent postage stamp is now 32 cents (33 cents next year), and the penny postcard is now 20 cents? How come there are excise taxes and luxury taxes? And what about those user fees for entering public lands to take a hike or buying an airline ticket?

The truth that candidates avoid is that if not raising taxes, they create new taxes, re-named "user fees" that perform the same function and hit taxpayers in the pocket.

These clever congressmen have an advantage over dumfounded voters: they hide new taxes and fees in indecipherable, elephantine budgets that no one but lobbyists and economists read, and even unabashedly claim they didn’t vote for the user fees or new taxes (although they voted for legislation on which the fees were tacked as amendments).

Members of Congress have another advantage over every household that runs on a budget and every business that wants to keep its doors open.

Congress simply spends whatever it wants, and simply puts the country deeper in debt and never worries about bankruptcy.

But members of Congress are not alone in blame for shelling out more and more: most of those who want Congress to cut taxes are those who also want fatter health benefits, higher Social Security payments in retirement, more military spending, more and better highways and airports, subsidies for agriculture, and on and on.

Members of Congress who speak so bravely about holding the line on taxes quickly abandon their virtuous frugality when it’s time to vote themselves unconscionable pay raises under the cover of darkness.

Yet, leave us be grateful this election season for at least one small piece of reality.

The next congressional elections are still 729 days away.

 

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