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Saturday, March 15, 2008
Joking aside, it’s time for car tax break
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I don’t get the joke. Sorry. I don’t.
“I think the people of Georgia get the joke,” said Gov. Sonny Perdue, ridiculing a proposed constitutional amendment that passed the Georgia House of Representatives 166-5 last week to virtually eliminate the property tax on personal cars, trucks and motorcycles.
It’s not a perfect plan — but it is one that offers relief to 93 percent of the households in Georgia.
It’s not perfect because a niggling $10 tax to create a state trauma network would be applied to personal and commercial vehicles. With some low-value vehicles, a $10 tax will exceed existing property taxes. The real concern, however, is that it’s not a clean break. It plants a tax that’s certain to grow. Future tax-and-spenders won’t have to clear that hurdle of public opposition to a new tax.
After the House passed the resolution, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle found himself in the position of a player in Hasbro’s Twister, a once-popular game designed to tie players in knots. Keep in mind that this is a tax cut, one reducing government’s take by $672 million in the 2011 fiscal year. No Republican and only five Democrats — three from the Atlanta area and two from Athens — voted against it.
Cagle’s twist started with the apparent objection that relief is needlessly delayed because it “doesn’t provide the full amount of relief for two years.” He’s for it, right? “Why are we waiting two years to cut taxes instead of having the courage to do it right now?” He’s for it, right?
Wrong. He opposes, or seems to, this particular method of allowing Georgians to keep $672 million of their earnings.
He’s interested, he said, in coming up with a “broad economic stimulus plan that will create jobs today.” The name Cagle and “economic stimulus” first appeared in this newspaper on Friday, March 14. We are now nine working days away from the end of the session.
Cagle did something similar last year in informing House leaders after they had passed a budget that the Senate would not agree to pork. The timing of the declaration touched off the three-way disaster that last year’s session became for Republicans.
This tax proposal, or a variant of it, has been in play for more than a year. Alternatives, specific or philosophical, could have been aired at any stage. “The first word that I ever heard that he [Cagle] had an economic stimulus idea was yesterday,” said House President Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta), who first proposed the “birthday tax” relief.
Cagle’s declaration coincided with Perdue’s “get the joke” assertion. Georgians “want infrastructure, they want education and they want the government to work for them,” he said. He worries that the combination of tax cuts, including one he proposed that will amount to about $90 million, will total about $750 million, leaving the state with too little spending money.
Burkhalter noted that taxes collected from the $3.6 billion that will come to Georgia as a result of the federal economic stimulus package, estimated to be $240 million, plus the $90 million represented by Perdue’s effort to repeal a quarter-mill the state collects in local property taxes, would fund the first full year of the House’s proposed tax relief.
He pointed out, too, that as a state senator, Perdue voted to remove the sales tax from groceries, which at the time amounted to 5 percent of the state budget. The car tax relief is about half that, he said, and furthermore the state has a surplus of $1.6 billion. “We are still fiscally very sound. … We will still grow 4.5 percent in the ‘09 budget. …”
While there’s a legitimate debate to be had about how much of our money government “needs,” it’s clear that, like the Democrats before them, Republicans will find a worthy need for every dollar available. They don’t have the courage to accept for themselves the cap on spending that many legislators would impose as spending discipline on local governments. The only real option then is to fund essential needs — and then return the excess collections.
The line of money-seekers is endless when there’s money on the table. To force priorities, limit collections. The House of Representatives, with only five dissenting votes, did that this week. No joke.
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