A short essay by UH Professor John Rieder criticizes the failure of reporters to follow-up on a question put to Gov. Lingle concerning a possible increase in the general excise tax to provide additional revenue during the current fiscal crisis.
Lingle’s reply was that raising the excise tax would make the recession worse, thereby actually resulting in even lower state revenues. The Democratic legislature actually did raise taxes last session, she went on; they raised the income tax, the hotel tax, and the fee on conveyances. But all of that “produced lower revenues” this year.
The interviewers, pressing forward with other questions, did not stop to ask Lingle whether she seriously meant to claim that these increases in taxes were responsible for the reduced revenues. Thus they let pass without comment an argument that no high school teacher would let a student get away with, a blatant and egregious example of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. I wish that they had challenged her instead.
Rieder then suggests a series of critical questions and comments he wished reporters had made.
Above all, I wish they had asked why the effects of a rise in excise tax would be worse than closing K-12 schools for nearly four weeks a year, with the incalculable impact of that closure upon the education and future prospects of the students, or why it would be worse than the effect of those closures upon the work and productivity of their parents as they re-arrange schedules, scurry to provide child care, and so on.
Rieder concludes:
But, for whatever reason, the reporters did not challenge the logically bankrupt anti-tax ideology Lingle was repeating. That leaves it up to the rest of us—to anyone with a voice and a venue, whether it be a conversation, a blog, or a classroom—to make the case that free public K-12 education is essential to the health of our society, and that taxes are not the anathema that Reagan-era Republicans have successfully convinced people they are, but rather are the legitimate and proper way for the government to raise money to pay for the services we the public want and demand it to provide.
Hmmmm. Should it be a surprise that this is not a perspective likely to be portrayed favorably the corporate media?
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Raising taxes, especially those which fall most heavily on the poor, in a declining economy is an idea which fails to address the fundamental problem: Hawaii’s government has most likely outgrown the size of the economy required to sustain it. Choices are inexorably being forced on the political establishment, and the one that they made regarding the teachers indicates that they won’t choose wisely. Primary and secondary education is an absolutely essential function of government, and the front-line teachers should have been protected until many other functions, including duplicative administrative ones, were targeted for contraction. University education is also a high priority, but there should be more room for creative cutting. There are more non-essential elements here: programs and even whole departments could be chopped without seriously damaging the core mission of undergraduate education. Triage is never easy, and the current sclerotic nature of local politics may well have made it impossible. So everyone suffers and no one thrives which achieves an crude equality of sorts.
I don’t know if this failure in reporting is so much a corporate tilt as much as a byproduct of the loss of institutional memory as the workforce grows younger (cheaper) and the older generations retire. The young generations were brought up in an era that vilified unions and liberal politics, so even within the context of being “impartial,” such obvious dissonance might never occur to them.
As for the comment above, Hawaii’s corporate taxes are on the bottom half of the nation and our per capita corporate tax collections are near the bottom. Our property tax rates are also some of the lowest in the nation. Our excise tax is below the 6% national average. But our income taxes are among the highest.
So a restructuring of our tax priorities could yield both more revenue and less tax burden on the lower/working classes. It all starts with getting Republicans and DINOs out of office and turning in a real progressive direction.
The owner-occupant property tax exemption in preparation to raise property taxes on speculators and commercial owners is a good example of fixing the tax alignment.