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Monday, April 23, 2007
All rights reserved: Boortz and Richardson tangle over who gets to use ‘fair tax.’ And Linder clarifies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s not enough that House Speaker Glenn Richardson has picked a fight with Gov. Sonny Perdue.
Now he and his boys must answer for allegedly poaching the phrase “fair tax.”
Last week, before the Legislature devolved into the fight over the governor’s veto of a budget bill, House Republican leaders tried to set the tone for next year’s meeting of the General Assembly.
They formally introduced H.R. 900, which will become their vehicle for reform of the state tax system.
The specifics of the bill have yet to be decided. House Republicans are thinking of a shift away from property taxes to a combination of sales and income tax.
But the legal caption says the bill would “provide for a comprehensive flat tax to be known as the fair tax.”
Oops.
Radio talk show host Neal Boortz has taken umbrage. You’ll recall that he and U.S. Rep. John Linder are joint authors of “The FairTax Book.”
“Glenn Richardson knows the fair tax is wildly popular in Georgia,” the WSB radio guy said. “So he has stolen the name of the fair tax and applied it to a tax bill that is not the fair tax and barely resembles it.”
On Saturday, while speaking to a Republican crowd, Richardson mentioned that he’d heard from Linder as well. Afterwards, he spoke with reporters.
“Linder called our office, and said if y’all don’t quit using that - that’s a trademark, and the state will be sued,” Richardson said.
It didn’t sound like Richardson was wedded to the name. “I kept saying, ‘Let me come up with an acronym that’s cutesy, but I was so bogged down in all the other details, I didn’t have time. One of my attorneys put ‘Georgia’s Fair Tax.”
But there is that matter of that call from Linder. We rang him up, and the congressman quickly responded just a few minutes ago. He tied all the many ends of the string together.
Linder said he did not call the speaker, or his office. But he did leave a message with a staffer for House Speaker pro tem Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta).
It seems that “fair tax” is indeed trademarked, but not by Linder or Boortz. It’s the intellectual property of Americans for Fair Taxation, a non-profit group out of Texas that’s been pushing the idea since 1995.
They’ve been aggressive about protecting that trademark, Linder said. “I was just warning Mark that he didn’t need to get into that fight.”
In fact, that’s why in the Boortz-Linder book, “fair” and “tax” are a single word. And they still had to get the group’s permission to use it, Linder said.
Just possibly, the Legislature approved a Feb. 5 presidential primary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today is Confederate Memorial Day, which means a state holiday, which means there’s no one at the state Capitol to sort out what bills passed and what didn’t in the final, pre-brawl hours of the state Legislature.
We know that H.B. 487 was given final passage by the state Senate. This was the original bill to have the ‘08 presidential primary moved to Feb. 5, and would be Georgia’s contribution to the longest race for the White House in history.
The Senate did strip away a House provision that would have lowered what it takes to win a contest to a plurality of 45 percent — so the bill was sent back to the House for final approval, which — so far as we can tell — never occurred.
However, late Friday, the House did attach the Feb. 5 primary provision to S.B. 194, another elections bill, and sent that bill back to the Senate for an agree vote, which the record indicates did take place.
But if you click on the final version of the bill, it shows no sign of the language the House attached. That may be a matter of the Senate clerk’s office catching up. We think it is. But we don’t know.
We’re open to anyone who can clarify — Jerry Keen, are you out there? It was your bill.
