In last week's vote on what had to be the most disingenuous tax-cut proposal ever presented before a legislative body, the Republican majority of the Georgia House got its comeuppance. In this case, the famous Daniel Webster assertion that "The power to tax is the power to destroy," is most aptly applied. House Speaker Glenn Richardson's proposal was simply a poorly disguised power grab —- an effort to destroy the power of local governments, those closest and most responsive and responsible to the people, and move it into the State House.

One of the things about this attempt that I, as a registered Republican, find most distressing is that it was a most un-Republican thing to do. I thought that Republicans opposed big government and supported fewer taxes. Promoters of the legislation even had the gall to describe this blatant disregard of Republican principles as a "tax cut." It was no tax cut. They were simply planning to replace one tax with more than a hundred others.

The speaker and the other misguided supporters of this sham seem to have forgotten that there is no free lunch. Eliminating the property tax meant, of course, that the money had to be gotten through some other tax —- in this case, more than a hundred new taxes on services and, maybe food, that hadn't been taxed before. So, instead of paying property taxes, Georgians would have been paying the same money through new sales taxes, trading sudden death for death by a thousand cuts.

Did anyone in the Legislature bother to consider the unintended consequences of these new taxes, such as individuals and businesses buying the newly taxed services in other, nearby states without those taxes? The Internet makes such commerce very easy. Georgia could have been perceived as unfriendly to business and, instead of the tax change generating more income for the state, Georgia would have ended up with less.

It looks like this Republican majority forgot, or never noticed, the lessons of just a few years ago when the Republican majority in Washington decided that being in power meant they could behave like the Democrats they'd previously characterized as wild spenders of the taxpayer's money. That was, until they got the chance to behave the same way.

Now, here in Georgia, instead of championing the Republican principles of small government and lower taxes, our Republican legislators abandoned them in the hope they could get their turn to wallow in the trough the power of taxation would keep full for them. And at the same time they would have fatally undermined the footings of one of Georgia's greatest structural assets, its many thriving, innovative, and popular municipal and county governments.

It's important that government, politicians and political parties stand for something, that they have principles that voters can recognize as being unique to them. Not unlike brand-name products in the supermarket. But what we seem to currently have in the State House is rows of generics.

> Richard Goodman is a freelance marketing copywriter who lives in Suwanee.