Category Archives: Taxes

How would Jesus vote? Would he vote at all?

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I see my latest posting has, much to my surprise, provoked a theological discussion. OK, I’ll jump in, and regret it later.

I just wish both sides would stop trying to enlist Jesus for their party platforms.

Jesus was pretty much indifferent to government, and for good reason. If he had been walking the Earth as a man today, he might have been more interested in politics than he was. In our representative democracy, we expect government to reflect our values, and then we fight over what those values should be. There is therefore room in the political arena for the kinds of things Jesus spoke of. But as a first-century Jew, the government he knew was about raw, exploitative power (the same thing libertarians think it’s about today, but they’re delusional), and it had no intention of bowing to the values of Judea or any other part of the empire. The Roman system was a plunder economy. There was no chance that any taxes one paid would ever be used to benefit you and your community. Yet despite that, he said go ahead and pay your taxes. He was sort of saying, if that’s Caesar’s trip, go along with it so he’ll leave you alone. But give God his due, which is something else altogether.

As for capitalism — well, I’ve always been struck by the way his parables seemed to uphold capitalist values. And that still challenges me, because he was totally against anyone being acquisitive. If you have two coats, give one away — that doesn’t sound like an affirmation of a consumer society to me. And yet the servant who buried his master’s money to keep it safe was castigated because he didn’t go out and risk it in an effort to make a profit. The servants who played the market were the good guys in the parable, but the one who refused to be a capitalist was the bad guy. (Of course, maybe his master wouldn’t have been so mad at him if he hadn’t indulged in all that Marxist rhetoric, calling the master an exploiter of the workers and such. That was sort of imprudent of him.)

So really, whether you think Jesus would have been for or against an activist government, or pro or con on capitalism, you can find something in the Gospels to support (or undermine) your conclusion. This might make Jesus seem contradictory, to the modern mind. But the thing was (I believe), he just didn’t care about the kinds of things we argue about in the public sphere today. If some Simon Zealot from either end of today’s political spectrum could sit down and try to enlist Him in the cause, I think he’d shrug and change the conversation to what HE deems to be important.

This is why, as a Catholic, I can’t root for either side in the political wars. I don’t think Jesus would, either. He would care about certain issues, standing up for justice and mercy, but he wouldn’t join a side. Both parties hold positions that are inimical to all that Rabbi Jesus taught.

A glimmer of hope

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OK, now that you think — based on my last few posts — that I’m piling on with the bad news about  Mark Sanford, let me throw you a curve. The governor said something the other day that made a very good impression on me, and I hope it will make an impression on some others over at the State House.

Cindi Scoppe’s column today, and this news story, may not make much of any impression on you because unlike me, most people live real lives and don’t sit around thinking about comprehensive tax reform the way my colleagues on the editorial board and I do. (And if so, good for you.) But please go back and read those items before we proceed. Pretend you’re listening to that "waiting for the answer" music from "Jeopardy" while I wait for you to finish reading (the column and the news story, I mean, not the "Jeopardy" link — stay on task, please).

Don’t want to read them? OK, here’s what they’re about: At a Kiwanis Club meeting in Columbia, reported the Associated Press, "Gov. Mark Sanford said Wednesday he thinks lawmakers should study how to fund education in South Carolina before they start to tweak property taxes."

This was astounding news. The governor who is all about cutting taxes, and whose principal interest in education has been in offering tax cuts to people if they will abandon the public schools, was saying Sanford_tax school funding should come before an extremely popular tax cut. And he was saying it to a mostly retired crowd (click on the picture), the very sort of crowd that tends to love to hear about property tax cuts.

And he’s RIGHT! He’s absolutely right! This is what public school advocates have been saying for years — particularly those of us who care about the biggest problem with public education in our state: the gross inequity in funding between affluent suburban school districts and their poor, rural counterparts. (More specifically, and comprehensively, what we have been saying on the editorial page is that the governor and the Legislature should look at ALL state needs — schools, roads, public safety, the whole shebang — then figure out what it would cost to address them adequately, and build a fair, sensible tax system that pays for it all. In other words, when we talk about "comprehensive tax reform," we are simultaneously talking about comprehensive spending reform.)

"If you want relief," the governor said, "then how are we going to do it in a way that still provides adequate funding for the education process?" He even mentioned the equity issue!

Another interesting thing about this story is that the lawmakers the AP contacted for reaction — some of the very ones who have been a voice of reason, putting the brakes on Mr. Sanford’s tuition tax credits and broad income tax cuts — came across as thoughtless "let’s cut taxes because it’s popular, and who cares if the state falls apart in the meantime" types.

I don’t want to pin too much on this one account of a speech. I wasn’t there, and I need to dig into this a bit before I get too excited. Mr. Sanford has expressed concern about education equity in the past, only to turn around and, absurdly, offer his tuition tax credit as the solution. (A reminder for the reality-challenged: Poor, rural families would be the last people in the state to benefit from the tuition tax credit. Why? Because they don’t pay enough income tax to qualify for the tax cut, and because even if they DID qualify for the refund, they can’t afford to come up with the tuition on the front end, and in any case there are no private schools nearby that would enroll their kids.)

But with lawmakers mindlessly determined to cut one tax in a vacuum yet again (a tax they don’t even collect, by the way; a huge part of this is lawmakers loving to meddle in local government affairs, where they don’t have to clean up the mess they create), any spark of hope that somebody out there is actually thinking about how all these issues are connected is worth fanning into a flame, if at all possible.

July 31 column, with links

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State House needs to get real
about local government — and taxes
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
    A MEMBER of my Rotary club last week asked new House Speaker Bobby Harrell a question about property taxes.
    Unfortunately, in answering the question, he did not say anything that sounded like "comprehensive tax reform."
    This is worrisome, because after a buildup of two or three years in which it has looked constantly as though lawmakers were on the verge of getting serious about tackling the entire problem of how we fund essential services in this state, I’m starting to hear a lot of talk that sounds disturbingly like we’re in for another populist, Band-Aid round of property tax cutting without regard for anything else. (See above editorial.)
    Take, for instance, what Mr. Harrell’s Senate counterpart had to say on our July 17 op-ed page.
    This column, by the way, will make more sense if you read that column, from Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell. For stark contrast, also check out the July 26 piece by the Municipal Association‘s Howard Duvall.
    Mr. McConnell’s piece is remarkable for its lack of grounding in reality; Mr. Duvall’s for the precise opposite.
    In case you don’t have access to the Web at the moment, let me offer a few excerpts from Mr. McConnell’s piece, with a little commentary of my own:
    "As long as we have property taxes, we are in effect paying rent to the government for the use of our property…." No, we’re not. What we are doing is paying our fair share for services that benefit us enormously as property owners. Those of us who own property are ultimately the greatest beneficiaries of services that make our communities worth living in: police and fire protection, libraries and, yes, public schools.
    "Local governments can charge us as much as they want and feed their need to spend our money like they have a blank check." Local governments are run by officials who are elected with just as much legitimacy as Mr. McConnell, and who are caught between their mandate to provide everyday, essential services in their communities; state and federal mandates that they do certain things whether they want to or not; and the state Legislature’s never-ending efforts to prevent them from paying what it costs to do these things. If legislators, in their callous disregard , force local governments to raise property taxes beyond what voters find tolerable, it is the local officials who get voted out of office.
    "Their (local governments’) presumption for reform has always been more sources of revenue but fewer and fewer restriction on how and how much they can spend." Well, duh. When costs are increasing, and everybody’s beating you up over the property tax, of course you’re going to seek other sources of revenue. And where in the world do state legislators get off placing restrictions on how local council members spend the revenues that they take full responsibility (and the political risk) for raising? Here’s how this works: When lawmakers passed a bill spelling out how local governments could charge impact fees for new residential development, they forbade the locals to spend the money on the one greatest cost such development generates — public schools. So the locals have to go back to the property tax, and they — not the guilty parties up in the State House — get strung up at the polls for it.
    "Reform must be fair and, at the very least, must not produce a net increase for government in collected taxes." Oh, no. We wouldn’t want to provide rural kids with the same quality education that city kids get, or put enough troopers on the road, or make our prisons secure, or get the mentally ill out of jails and emergency rooms, or any of those other frills we can’t seem to afford with the present tax structure.
    "I hope that then the voices of the people from the mountains to the coast can drown out those of the paid lobbyists." Translation: I hope that rising dissatisfaction with the problem the Legislature created gives me the political license I need to utterly ignore the realistic counsel of the governments closest to the people.
    Local governments deal with the public at the most intimate level, where basic services are provided. They know what the public really wants from government because the public lets them know immediately when they’re failing to provide it. And they know what it costs, and they know what it’s like to be caught between the people they live among and the ideologues in Columbia who keep trying to make their jobs harder.
    I finally understand why Mark Sanford is the first governor I’ve seen Sen. McConnell get along with: Both are passionately, pedantically libertarian. And neither of them allows the reality of what happens at the business end of government — where essential services are provided to real people — interfere with them as they sit in the State House and endlessly spin their anti-government theories.
    Both of them starkly displayed this disconnect on the seat belt issue. But it matters so much more when the governor maligns public schools, or the senator trashes local government, with no regard for what’s actually happening out here in the world.