Walter C. Jones:

Who's The True Conservative?

By Walter C. Jones
Morris News Service

(4/7/080 The fall legislative campaigns began in earnest at midnight Friday when the 2008 General Assembly session ended without passing most of the major bills Republican leaders proposed.

The dead-bill list includes transportation funding, vouchers for students in chronically failing schools and a trauma-care funding source. Topping the GOP list, though, was some type of tax relief.

A year ago, House Speaker Glenn Richardson began selling a conservative touchstone: repeal of all property taxes with an encore to repeal income taxes.

His plan kept shrinking before he finally put to the House a measure to repeal school property taxes, only to lose in his own chamber. He succeeded in winning House approval of a constitutional amendment to end the car-tag tax and limiting property assessments to the inflation rate, considerably less dramatic than his first designs.

The Senate countered with a bill to trim the income tax 10 percent over five years, an idea it backed away from during last-minute negotiations and instead offered phasing in some car-tag exemptions over five years.

Then there were Gov. Sonny Perdue's two tax cuts, eliminating the quarter mill the state levies on property and exempting senior citizen's earnings from income taxes, both smaller than the House plan.

Sometimes, campaigning on a failed tax cut can be more productive than on one that actually passed. For if it had passed, legislators looking for re-election might have had trouble presenting a follow-up, but now they can ask to be sent back to Atlanta to finish the job.

A dead tax cut also offers a villain to blame, someone to be run against.

Richardson, a Hiram Republican, offered up his Senate counterpart and party member, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle.

"I hope Georgians by the 9 million will thank him tomorrow and flood him with e-mails and tell him we're sick of Casey Cagle," Richardson said Friday night. "It's time to get a new lieutenant governor."

For his part, the lieutenant governor wasn't apologizing, telling reporters he'd been in enough fights in the past to not be spooked by a little name calling.

Cagle described his stance as one based on fiscal conservatism. Every tax cut should be matched with spending reductions, he said, and Richardson's scheme to have the state essentially pay the car tax to individual counties rather than the automobiles owners wouldn't directly link the tax cut to spending. Indeed, House leaders said all along they could afford their plan because rising state revenues would pay for it.

"If we're going to cut taxes, the best way, you have to demonstrate where those expenses are going to be cut as well," Cagle said. "The best way to cut spending is also to cut taxes (for the government that spends them)."

Senate Majority Leader Tommie Williams of Lyons also said a slowing economy with declining state tax collections made Richardson's timing wrong, a point Perdue repeatedly made before he left for China during the final week of the session.

"It's tough economic times for large tax cuts," Williams said.

Perdue tightened the vice when he responded to February's sagging tax collections by reducing the revenue estimate that lawmakers had to work with by $245 million, notes Neil Shorthouse, executive director of Communities in Schools, a dropout-prevention program.

"One of the biggest problems was the loss of $245 million," he said. "It cramped everybody's style."

So, who's the most conservative, Richardson, Cagle or Perdue?

And who's responsible for no major tax cut passing, the speaker who couldn't get his original plan through his own chamber and bucked other party leaders' counseling, the lieutenant governor who stood up to Richardson, or the governor who was absent during a critical time when his predecessors would have been sleeping in the office?

A coalition of groups on the other side of the ledger, so to speak, has proposed a comprehensive study of tax policy, suggesting this session's collapse of tax reform sets the stage for a broader review. These groups, which generally favor increased spending for various government services, argue for loopholes to be closed and the structure to be modified to reflect modern state priorities.

"This ending has been appropriate," said Alan Essig, an economist who heads the liberal think tank Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. "They haven't been dealing in reality."

For instance, Essig dismisses claims that cutting state taxes would stimulate the weakening economy as not backed by academic studies or testimony by any economists. It's not accurate, he said, to use the economic benefits of President Reagan's reduction in the top income-tax rates from 80 percent to 35 percent as the basis for trimming the state's comparatively smaller 6 percent rate by 10 percent, as the Senate proposed. The impact on individual pocketbooks wouldn't be big enough to change behavior.

But he heaped greater scorn on Richardson.

"Everything he wanted to do didn't make policy sense. He just wanted to do something," Essig said.

Well, they did nothing, or at least not the major promises they'd made. And now the Republicans will have each other to blame all campaign long.