The governor of Utah and the speaker of the Utah House have apparently gotten themselves into a bidding war as to which of them might offer the bigger tax cut.
The question is not so much which of them will win. That $1 billion surplus is burning a hole in their pockets, making it likely that there will be some big tax break that just about everyone who has a desk on Capitol Hill will be claiming credit for.
The question is whether one or both of these worthies is fiendish enough to realize that they are perpetrating a scam, or foolish enough to believe his own rhetoric.
Tax cuts of this magnitude — the $200 million proposed by Gov. Gary Herbert, the $225 million pitched by Speaker Brad Wilson — are generally sold as empowering the (good) people at the expense of the (evil) state.
Lower tax rates mean you get to keep more of your money — and it is your money — and do with it as you want, or need, rather than leaving it in the hands of politicians such as, well, Herbert and Wilson to fritter away.
And it is entirely possible that if the state kept all that dough, it might do some really dumb things with it. Like hire out-of-state law firms to try to wrest land that belongs to all the people of the United States away from them to be leased for oil wells or coal mines. Or hire lawyers to defend blatantly unconstitutional pieces of legislation that would ban abortion.
(Not to pick on the honorable legal profession, but does anyone else notice a pattern here?)
But in a low-tax state like Utah, turning that much money back to the taxpayers, in amounts that for most of us will be a pittance, does not strengthen individuals. It weakens them.
The state could cut your taxes to zero and the extra money in your pocket would not allow you to hire a teacher, pave a road, fine a polluter, equip a cop or put out a fire. Or heed the voters’ mandate to expand Medicaid. That is stuff we can only do in concert, not independently.
The desire to cut taxes and the urge to reduce regulations on developers and industry and banks — when they aren’t based on simple greed — flow from the idea that if money and power are distributed over the whole of the people, rather than concentrated in the hands of government, then all the people, rich and poor and in between, will gain what the government has given up, or had taken from it.
It might be nice to live in a universe where that happened.
But in our reality, broken-up power does not stay broken up. It congeals into larger and larger globs, like petroleum spilled from a tanker into the bay. Like cosmic dust collapsing on itself to form giant planets or, when the mass is great enough, a thermonuclear event called a star.
That assemblage of power can belong to the people, through their elected government, or it can belong to enriched individuals and corporations, answerable to no one. But it will collect onto itself.
Business people realize that ever-larger masses of power are, if not wholly desirable, natural and useful. That’s why businesses grow, absorb other businesses and merge the capital of a great many investors into a sum large enough to do something.
An attack on the state’s ability to create economies of scale for the good of all, which is what most big tax cut proposals are, shows that the tax-cutters are either ignorant of the laws of political physics or think you are.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tribune staff. George Pyle.
George Pyle, editorial page editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, has a personal gravitational field that has fluctuated considerably over the years. gpyle@sltrib.com
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