Recently Wordbones blogged about a proposed “Taxpayer Protection Initiative” that Howard County Republicans would like to put on the November ballot. The basic proposal (as outlined in a Baltimore Sun story) is to change the Howard County charter to require a supermajority of four county council members (out of five) to approve any county tax increases. (By the way, does the Howard County Republican party have its own page to explain and promote this initiative? I couldn’t find one on its web site, and Google was no help.)
I happen to think this is a bad idea for several reasons, and rather snarkily unloaded on Howard County Republicans in the comments section of the post. I’ll be nicer in this post, and limit myself to presenting some reasons why this initiative should be rejected. I’ll start with some lesser concerns and then continue with more fundamental flaws.
The first issue was raised in the Sun story, namely that the proposed initiative addresses only taxes and not “user fees.” This omission is disingenuous: It’s perfectly reasonable for the county to charge user fees in cases where the fee can be tied directly to a service and bears a reasonable relation to the cost for the county to provide that service. However if we make it more difficult to raise taxes then it’s going to be tempting for the county council to instead institute more and more new fees, to significantly increase existing fees, and to have high fees substitute more and more for general tax revenue.
At that point such “user fees” will in effect be special-purpose taxes under another name. This may allow politicians to boast about not raising taxes (strictly defined) but the overall monetary burden to county residents and businesses will be the same as if the revenue had been raised through taxes in the traditional way. And we’ll be likely left with a complex and relative arbitrary system of user fees, and like a complex tax code it would be likely be rife with disparities and unfairnesses driven by special interest lobbying.
Second, the proposed supermajority requirement applies only to tax increases and not to other tax-related legislation, including tax cuts. (I’m presuming here that the Sun story is correct and that Wordbones’s reference to “tax measures” in general is incorrect.) Proponents of the initiative presumably want to limit the potential for a council majority to impose onerous ta increases. Fair enough, but what about limiting the potential for a council majority to enact drastic tax cuts that might affect the county’s fiscal solvency and AAA bond rating and saddle county taxpayers with increased interest payments on county bonds? Why shouldn’t we have a supermajority requirement to address that scenario?
Finally, and most importantly, the initiative doesn’t address spending measures at all. If you make it difficult to raise taxes, but put no such restriction on increasing spending, then you run the risk of politicians resorting to accounting tricks and growing deficits to fund what in many cases are essential public services and/or spending obligations that can’t be avoided (e.g., snow removal last winter).
In this regard I think the “starve the beast” theory, i.e., that tax cuts will force spending cuts, is pretty much bogus and disproven by history. Certainly the last Republican administration was quite willing to take on spending obligations well in excess of what tax revenue might justify.
Now to a more fundamental question: Why is this initiative really needed? Since it would be a major change to the county charter, I think the burden is on its proponents to justify why we need to make this relatively radical change to the status quo.
As noted in the Sun story, the county is already restricted in how much it can raise the county-directed portion of the state income tax. And as Wordbones noted, the 4-to-1 Democratic majority on the council hasn’t exactly been going crazy with enacting new tax increases. So what problem is this initiative actually supposed to solve?
Some might complain (as did a commenter on Wordbones’s post) that the Howard County tax burden on businesses is higher than in other jurisdictions. That may or may not be the case; the commenter presented no evidence to this effect, though others are welcome to. (Make sure you include user fees as well though, as noted above.)
To the extent that the Howard County tax burden is higher, at least two responses are possible. First, this is an affluent jurisdiction with arguably better potential for businesses than other less wealthy jurisdictions. A business would be silly to complain that it costs more to rent space in a mall than in a strip shopping center; similarly businesses operating in Howard County have access to a potentially more lucrative customer base than elsewhere, even factoring in the increased costs due to taxes and government fees.
It may also be that in other cases Howard County does indeed have a higher tax burden than other jurisdictions of comparable wealth and population. In that case businesses are free to make specific proposals to the electorate as to how exactly that burden could be reduced, and exactly what spending cuts should be made. (And remember, the county has an annual budget on the order of a billion dollars, so to make even a 1% reduction requires spending cuts on the order of ten million dollars or so.) If you’re just griping about taxes in general and not making specific concrete proposals then I feel perfectly justified in ignoring you.
So, if you can make clear and compelling arguments for this initiative then you’re welcome to do so (but see my note below), and I’ll gladly consider their merits. In the meantime I’ll stand by my current opinion: That the Taxpayer Protection Initiative is basically a political stunt by Howard County Republicans with two primary purposes: to try to boost Republican turnout this November by trying to tap into (somewhat unfocused) popular discontent with governments, and (if successful) to compensate for Republican failure to gain a majority on the county council by making it easier for a Republican minority to pursue a strategy of blanket opposition to tax increases and hold the council majority hostage to their demands.
NOTE: Feel free to add your comments below, but be aware that I dislike anonymous commenters and will summarily delete the comments of anyone who doesn’t comment under a unique name of some sort, real or fictional. I do this not because I care about people’s real-life identities; rather I want to be able to know that the person (whoever that might be) who makes a particular comment is the same person making a later comment, whether to this post or to future one. That way we can better gauge the consistency of your arguments and the accuracy of your predictions.
PZGURU (pzguru@aol.com) - 2010-05-19 15:01
Hecker - you said: “Certainly the last Republican administration was quite willing to take on spending obligations well in excess of what tax revenue might justify.” Are you talking about Bush or Chuck Ecker? I assume you mean Bush. You are right that he ran deficits and that’s not acceptable. What about the current democRAT administration that is running deficits that are at least 4-5 times the size of Bush’s deficits?!?!?!?! Please let us all know how you feel about this. Or are you completely biased in your criticism of government officials? While Howard County might not have been on a spending binge, the fact is that people have the right to control the government officials. Not the other way around. If you don’t like the referendum initiative, then vote against it. It’s high time that governments, city, county, state, and federal, be reined in as far as their spending habits and constant increase in taxes. The people are being taxed to death and we are sick of it. It’s too long of a point to completely and thoroughly explain, but the gist of it is that ALL government bodies in this Country are getting too big and are out of control with spending and taxing. If it means drastically cutting “services” so be it. The private sector could more efficiently provide services than any government body anyway. Just look at how much money is lost through fraud and mismanagement at the Social Security program alone. Billions of dollars!!! It comes down to whether people believe in smaller government and reduced taxation, or big government and never-ending tax and fee increases. I believe in the former.
hecker - 2010-05-20 02:22
PZGURU: Thank you for leaving a comment, and especially thanks for using an actual pseudonym; I do appreciate it. I’m done with snarkiness, so I’ll try to address your points (as expressed both here and on Wordbones’s blog) in a serious manner. First, I did mean the Bush administration. On the question of deficits, I agree that the US has a looming problem with excessive ongoing deficits that needs to be addressed starting soon (essentially as soon as the economy is solidly in recovery). My personal feeling is that part of this could be done through targeted tax increases, but that the vast majority of deficit reduction will need to be done through spending cuts, especially in the big-ticket budget items like military spending and entitlements that account for the bulk of Federal spending. On the issue of the county budget, it’s a perfectly reasonable position to want to reduce taxes and the overall size of government. My point is that a serious effort to do that has to include not just making tax increases more difficult, but also proposing concrete spending cuts. As I noted previously, “starving the beast” (i.e., focusing on tax cuts alone) hasn’t worked historically, as politicians of both parties are happy to continue spending even as tax revenues decline. So my suggestion is that if the Howard County Republican party really believes that Howard County government is too large and that Howard County residents and businesses are over-taxed, then its county council and county executive candidates should run on a platform containing a set of specific proposals on tax and spending cuts. Until and unless they do that, I’ll continue in my belief that the Taxpayer Protection Initiative is mostly a political gimmick that doesn’t really address the problem that you and others perceive.
How I met one of the most interesting of men « Jessie X - 2010-05-20 03:03
[…] going to fast forward here a sec. Frank has, albeit infrequently, written about local concerns on his own blog, and he does, on occasion, comment on other local blogs. Recently, he commented on Wordbones’ […]
PZGURU (pzguru@aol.com) - 2010-05-20 15:00
I would tend to agree with your point about having a two-pronged attack. Restrictions on tax increase added with spending reductions. I believe that your agressive stance at the GOP seems a little out of place though considering it is typically elected democrats (or liberals)who seem to run up deficits the most and then simply say “time for a tax increase”. The only reason Ulman et. al. have not gone that route is that he knows that if he did propose even a single tax increase of any amount, he’d lose his re-election bid. I predict that should he get re-elected, there will 100% be some sort of tax/fee increases in the pipeline.
hecker - 2010-05-21 00:11
PZGURU: I’ll admit that I’m a registered Democrat, and in general not a fan of the Republican party. However in this case I’m ragging on the Howard County Republicans not because they’re promoting fiscal discipline but because they’re doing so in such a gimmicky and (in my opinion) likely-to-be-ineffective manner. Apropos of your point about elected Democrats, in recent memory it’s been elected Republicans who run up deficits and then turn around and say “time for a tax cut”. So Howard County Republicans are also catching some fall-out flak from me for the Bush administration wiping out the budget surplus inherited from Clinton, and putting us in a position where we had to go even further in the hole to stave off an economic meltdown. As a Democrat I believe that government has a role to play in laying the groundwork for private enterprise to flourish, that groundwork including reasonable regulations, good public infrastructure, public education, and so on. I also believe that government can and should promote social justice, albeit to a much more limited extent. However at the same time I believe that in order for an activist government to maintain its legitimacy with the people it must spend taxes wisely, keep the tax burden reasonable, and not pile up large structural deficits and massive public debt. Thus from my perspective I’m happy to see Howard County elect Democrats but have some restraints put on any latent tendency they might have to over-spend; however I think that restraint should be in the form of credible Republican candidates promoting fiscal discipline, not in the form of half-baked ballot initiatives. P.S. I’m also going to respond to your points on Wordbones’s blog re cities and rural areas at some point. But that might be in the form of a future blog post, and I don’t have the time for it right now.