Got to be proud of the kids

A couple thoughts on the upcoming elections....

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I couldn't be prouder of the high school kids. In general, they're fighting for their lives to get the levy passed, but whether they were for or against it, there's something wonderful about them getting fired up over politics -- and local politics at that.

I come from the '60s, where youth were highly political. We actually thought we could make a difference, and eventually, we did. A lot of the modern political world, from civil rights to women's rights to clean air and water come from the political activism of those days, although that activism was launched by opposition to the war in Vietnam.

And over the years, I've seen kids get involved roughly every four years when presidential politics come around.

Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once said that "all politics is local." But all too often, even adults don't pay attention to local politics. So seeing kids getting involved at the local level is heartwarming. If they succeed, they will go through life believing that it really is possible to affect political change. I hope they do.

Every generation gets branded by those of us in the older generations as being lazy, shiftless, ignorance and clueless. Think back to your own days as a kid.

But these kids are proving us wrong. They are bright, articulate and willing to get involved. They should be praised, and, I hope, rewarded.

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Every election we run candidate announcement stories. They're pretty vanilla, essentially just letting the candidates expound on their positions and why they think people should vote for them. Pretty much, we let it go at that, since we don't have the time or staff for in-depth analysis in most cases.

But last week, I got a few minutes free and decided to check on something one of the candidates had said that I wasn't sure was right.

Marla Lawson, who is running for the state senate seat currently held by Tim Corder, is running, in part, on a platform of eliminating the state income tax. She believes it can be replaced with a two-cent increase in the sales tax. So I called the state tax commission to see if that was true, wanting to look at the revenue generated over the last few years, and estimated for this year, from those two taxing sources. Roughly, they both generate about the same amount of taxes to the state's general fund. As a result, a two cent increase would be woefully low. In fact, tax commission staff agreed that it would take a doubling of the current sales tax to replace the individual income tax. That means a 12 cent sales tax. In effect, you'd be taxed one cent for every eight cents you spend.

Lawson spent six years preparing for this race. Why she couldn't make that same 15-minute phone call I did I don't know. But she's not the only candidate for the legislature who's adopted that platform. As far as I can tell, about a dozen other candidates, all ultra-conservative "tea party" types, are advocating the same thing. You wonder where they get some of the numbers they're using (a two-cent hike compared to an actual 12-cent hike). Have politicians reached a point where they're just pulling numbers out of thin air? Gee, that hardly ever happens.

I also have a basic philosophical problem with the sales tax, which is considered a "regressive" tax. Sure, it's "pay as you go," like Lawson said, but the rich don't spend all their money on goods and services. They bank a lot of it, or put it in investments (that right now are taxed primarily through the income tax). They also have considerable more disposable income -- more money available at the end of the month than the poor, for whom the money often ends earlier than the end of the month.

Look at just groceries for example. Unless you have a teenager in the house, most people eat about the same amount of food. The poor buy more generic brands, and try and make it last longer, but overall the bill for food alone isn't going to be that much different between a rich person and a poor person. If you have a couple hundred dollars a month not committed to basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter, you can absorb an extra $30 or $40 a month in an increased sales tax for your food purchases. If you're poor, and your "disposable" income for a month is less than $50, that same increase hurts a lot. So any increase in the sales tax isn't really an equal burden for the rich and poor alike.

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Finally, I want to encourage people to vote absentee. It's really easy to do and a lot more convenient than standing in line at the polls. So vote early (but not often).