By Judith L. Brown
I headed to Boise for the Aug. 25 special session of the Idaho Legislature intending to enjoy the political theater to the best of my ability. I’ve spent the past months analyzing and opposing the policy that the Legislature was now going to enact — repealing the property tax maintenance and operations levy for the public schools, raising the sales tax rate from 5 cents to 6 cents, and threatening the quality of public education in Idaho all in one fell swoop. We’d defeated several near-clones of this proposal just last April.
Then Gov. Dirk Kempthorne left Idaho to become Secretary of the Interior and Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, a gung-ho proponent of repealing the M&O levy, became governor. By the time Risch called the special session at the end of July, passage of his proposal was a done deal. It couldn’t be stopped, even though online polls being conducted by several newspapers around the state showed public sentiment running more than 60 percent against it.
So I went to Boise, thinking that if it all got to be just too much I could let off steam in my next column — in the spirit of “It’s my column and I’ll vent if I want to.”
But I don’t want to. There were moments of almost-humor, such as when we walked into the House Revenue and Taxation Committee’s meeting room for the bill’s first hearing. It’s a small room with just three rows of chairs for the press and all those who want to testify – and lots of people, most of them opposed as far as I could tell, wanted to testify. Half of the chairs in the third row had ribbon across them and were marked “Reserved for the Crow family.” Committee chairman Dolores Crow, R-Nampa, had invited her family to watch her performance. That’s when you know public testimony is not an important part of the process.
But interesting and noteworthy things also happened.
For one, debates about tax policy have changed in Idaho. Until recently, no one asked the “who pays?” question and there was no real discussion of how tax policy would effect households versus businesses and higher-income families versus lower-income families. Discussions of the distributive impacts have been a central part of the debate over the property tax cut/sales tax hike proposal. These issues are raised foremost by the Democrats, who have become consistent and forceful advocates for fair tax policy, but they are joined by several more moderate Republicans.
Another interesting point about this most recent debate is that I don’t think the Republican supermajority in the Legislature can call itself fiscally conservative any longer. I have long thought that one of the best things about working on fiscal issues in Idaho was that, conservative though the state is, its fiscal policy was pretty sound. It had a balanced and stable tax structure. As a state that was large in area but small in population, it made an almost heroic effort to fund public services. It was prudent and responsible with its limited resources.
Something has changed. The Aug. 25 special session was all about spending, and probably over-spending, the state’s current budget surplus. The surplus could and should have been one of the main topics of the coming 2007 legislative session. There should have been open analysis and discussion of how much of the surplus was likely to be one-time money and how much ongoing money. Alternative ideas for how best to use the surplus should have been allowed to vie with one another. Instead, the entire surplus has now been spent on one thing – repealing the M&O levy. This could turn out to be another of those reckless actions that forces budget shortfalls in a couple of years. It was neither a fiscally conservative nor a fiscally responsible action.
So how is it that this policy, according to the polls unpopular with a majority of voters, has become law? The Republican supermajority in the Idaho Legislature has a lot to do with it. A short-term activist governor and strong-arm lobbying by the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry played their parts too. It’s the supermajority, however, that makes it possible to enact policies with “just for show” public hearings and without due consideration of competing ideas.
But supermajorities rarely last forever, and the elections are coming. There’s still lots to debate this campaign season.
* Judith L. Brown is an economist and director of the Idaho Center on Budget and Tax Policy. She lives in Moscow with her family and can be reached at jlbrown@turbonet.com.