The knee-jerk Republican chant that new taxes are too burdensome for Americans during tough times has a certain tin ring to it. For GOP lawmakers in Idaho or Washington, D.C., necessary new taxes are too burdensome even in good economic times.
This dogma amounts to bad economics.
In the name of no new taxes, Idaho Republican legislators for the third time have punished in-state merchants by refusing to join 22 other states in enforcing a 6 percent sales tax on catalog and Internet businesses as part of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project. So, local retailers are placed at a significant sales disadvantage.
Trotting out its heavy-gun lobbyists, the alcoholic beverage industry browbeat lawmakers into succumbing to the specious argument that hiking taxes on beer, wine and whiskey to fund Idaho's chemical abuse programs would unfairly target drinkers. And where does the abuse begin, one might ask? Without new funds, the state's chemical abuse rehabilitation programs face a 10 percent cut.
The shopworn bad-timing rationale was put into play, the same as it has been during all the years since the tax on beer was hiked in 1961 and on wine in 1971.
The medical community and law enforcement backed the alcohol tax increase. Those groups are on the front lines where alcohol and chemical abuse are most evident—in bloody traffic accidents and physical assaults caused by intoxicated people.
Idaho's Department of Fish & Game also needs increased fees.
All these revenue needs are based on credible and convincing evidence that heavier demands for services are being placed on state agencies, even as lawmakers engineer relatively less funding.
This is a mathematical formula for destruction. It also bequeaths to some future legislature the painful and onerous task of hiking taxes far faster and higher to meet crises now just in the making.
The same Republican no-tax creed was the driving principle of President George W. Bush. Look what it got the American people—a trillion-dollar war waged without raising taxes, which led to wiping out a robust surplus and inflicting record deficits and debt on generations of unborn Americans.
Idaho Republicans should have learned from the Bush era's string of economic blunders, but apparently haven't.
Had Idaho lawmakers long ago shored up revenues for highway projects, the state's roads and bridges wouldn't be in their sorry state. How ironic that state legislators now are counting on Washington's impoverished treasury and a Democratic president's stimulus spending to bail out Idaho's financial shortfalls.
