Conflicts of Interest?
Tom Pauken couldn't get what he wanted in the last Texas legislative session so now he's attacking the legislators personally.
Tom Pauken wanted to handcuff local governments in the name of "appraisal reform". Property taxes are based on property value. When property values go up, so do property taxes, unless the taxing authorities cut rates. Pauken doesn't like the fact that elected representatives aren't cutting rates fast enough to suit him, so he wants to restrict their powers. Why doesn't he just ask voter to turn them out of office? Why, indeed? Maybe because he knows that local voters like their local representatives.
If Pauken can't get local voters to elect people who'll do what Pauken wants, and he can't get state legislators to force local government to do what Pauken wants, what's his next tactic? It's to personally attack the state legislators, which he does in a Dallas Blog column accusing two of Pauken's leading opponents of conflicts of interest. Sensing the charge might be too subtle for voters to get worked up about, Pauken also accuses one, Mike Villareal, of being "rude" to the point of "obnoxiousness". (Oh my!) He says Villareal was uncooperative with Pauken's traveling marketing campaign last year. (Double oh my!)
Pauken conveniently neglects to mention that Mike Villareal strongly supported mandatory sales disclosure. If you want "appraisal reform", the nominal subject of Pauken's failed task force, then you have to start with accurate appraisals. And nothing will advance that goal better than mandatory sales disclosure. This reform was not pushed by Pauken. Pauken doesn't attack legislators who fought against this reform. No, he attacks a legislator who fought for it.
Pauken has his own agenda here that he's not revealing and it's not appraisal reform.
Scott Burns' Picks: Gravel and Paul
The wisdom of The Dallas Morning News' personal finance columnist Scott Burns is at its best when advising individuals about credit card use, but the quality tails off when advising the country about national politics. His advice about the 2008 Presidential election should be approached with great caution. He asks voters to consider Sen. Mike Gravel and Rep. Ron Paul. Really.
First, he advises voting for a candidate who wants to replace our current income tax with a national sales tax. The intended effect is to encourage saving over consumption. That would be good. But an unintended side effect would be to increase inequality. That would be bad.
Assuming any such plan is revenue neutral, if someone ends up paying less tax, someone else has to pay more. With a sales tax, people who save more would pay less taxes. People who save less, would pay more. In today's world, who saves more - the rich or the poor? So, even though a national sales tax would encourage everyone, rich or poor, to save more, the result of this proposal will be to favor the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. Not such a good idea. Talk of compensating for this by making cash grants to the poor is simply an admission that the plan is highly regressive in nature. No thanks.
Second, Burns recommends voting out of office anyone who voted for Social Security reform in 1983, for making decades of overspending and lies possible. Instead, how about targeting the politicians who did the actual overspending and lying? Remember the Clinton Presidency, where the budget deficits of Reagan and Bush senior gradually gave way to budget surpluses? Remember the 2000 campaign, when Al Gore proposed using the coming budget surpluses to pay down the national debt and George Bush proposed leaving the debt in place and returning the annual surpluses in the form of tax cuts? Remember the years since when a Republican President and a Republican Congress oversaw a ballooning of federal debt? The sins we are paying for now weren't committed in 1983.
Strip Clubs: If you can't close 'em, tax 'em
Frontburner's Trey Garrison doesn't think much of a proposed state-mandated $5 cover charge at strip clubs to pay for sexual assault prevention programs. He says that the director of Texas Association Against Sexual Assault (TAASA), which is behind the proposal, "believes in her cause so much that she's unhesitant to dig deep into other people's pockets to pay for it."
Well, that libertarian viewpoint is one way to look at it, I suppose. I don't have that same knee-jerk reaction against communities trying to uphold a certain quality of life by means like this. TAASA probably thinks that strip clubs directly contribute to sexual assaults, so taxing strip club patrons is a way of making them pay to clean up the harm that results from them being in business. Or perhaps TAASA believes that the tax will discourage attendance, thus reducing the number of sexual assaults that occur. This community strategy could be justified, similar to the strategy of taxing cigarettes and alcohol, provided there's some evidence that the underlying assumption is true -- that strip clubs lead to sexual assaults. I haven't seen any such evidence and I doubt TAASA has any.
No comments:
Post a Comment