Common sense

I’ve been meaning to comment on the tax cut question, and this observation by Dan Gillmor and Molly Ivins is a good-enough foil:

The national Republican party isn’t this bad, but it’s getting there. The tax bills they’ve passed, for example, insult common sense, and push a dagger into what was left of fiscal responsibility.

It’s common sense that any tax cut is going to favor the wealthy, since they pay more taxes to begin with, right? And if you’re looking to stimulate the economy, which common sense says we should want in the time when 8.3% of Silicon Valley is unemployed and rallying for solutions and interest rates have already been cut, cutting taxes to put more investment dollars in play seems like a pretty common sense move, right? And if you’re concerned about budget deficits at the state level and the inability of government to fund education adequately, it’s common sense to reduce the federal bite in order to make more money available to the authority that actually funds public education, the states, right? So what’s the problem with cutting federal taxes?

Tax cuts are a problem because they benefit those who don’t need help, while failing to directly help those who need free health care, longer and better unemployment benefits, free broadband, and what-have-you. So the proposal is to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for all these great programs.

Only we tried that and it doesn’t work. California is the state with the biggest deficit, and it’s also the state with the most progressive tax system, that is, the one where the wealthy pay the largest share of the overall state tax burden. And the one thing we can learn from following California’s budget history is that the state never collects the correct amount of taxes: some years we collect way too little to support all the programs, which leads to crisis, and in other years we collect way too much, which leads to spending like drunken sailors.

This is because the incomes of the wealthy are more sensitive to fluctuations in the economy than the incomes of the working- and middle-class are. And just as inequitable taxation is an injustice that can’t be ignored, unpredictable taxation is an abomination that stands firmly in the way of responsible government.

There’s also something wrong with a state of affairs where half the people view the state as a burden that prevents them from supporting their families while the other half views it as slot machine that spits out free money on every pull of the crank. People should view government as a mutual benefit society that we all support because it works for all of us, not just the upper half and not just the bottom half. The present state of affairs is undemocratic.

Texas doesn’t want to follow California down the road of boom-or-bust taxation, and that’s certainly a laudable, common sense goal. Tax policy has to strike a balance between equity and predictability, and that’s not class warfare, it’s common sense. But Steve Peace’s wishes to the contrary, the California legislature shows no signs of willingness to correct the structural problems behind our current budget disaster, which would involve rewriting Prop 13 and flattening the tax curve. There’s a bi-partisan conspiracy at work to maintain the status quo.

Ivins also ridicules the DeLay redistricting plan in Texas by taking it out of context. Most Texans are Republicans these days – 57% moved Reep in the last Congressional election – but most of their Congressional delegation is Democrat – 17 to 15. This is because Martin Frost devised a redistricting plan in 1990 that gerrymandered the state like crazy for the Dems, who then held a majority in the legislature. Houses were split in 2000, so the courts had to issue redistricting, and they stuck with the Frost plan with minimal changes. So this isn’t fair, but Ivins doesn’t want you to know that.

Now why shouldn’t a state with Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature have a Republican majority in its Congressional delegation? It’s common sense that they should, and that’s exactly what DeLay and his fellow Texans in the majority want. The anti-Democratic Texas Dems have a different idea, and we certainly don’t want that sentiment creeping across the whole nation, to the detriment of our democracy.