Cents and sensibility

With the start of the 1998 legislative session less than a month away, there are encouraging signs that the state’s $185 million revenue surplus will be given nonpartisan treatment.

What’s discouraging are signs that the prime beneficiary of this novel approach to government will be the well-intentioned but wrongheaded move to roll back the sales tax.

Not that a penny less sales tax wouldn’t be nice. Heck, no sales tax at all would be heaven. Or at least New Hampshire. But of all the taxes Maine taxpayers pay, this one is the most fair, the most progressive, the least broken. The essentials of life, the things the poor, the elderly, the young struggling families need to survive, are exempt. The wealthy, who buy large amounts of expensive, nonessential stuff, fork over the most. Tourists, who buy virtually nothing anyone actually needs, kick in more than a fair share. Compared to the frightening income tax and especially to the ruinous property tax, the sales tax is practically a pleasure to pay.

So it’s troubling to hear that a growing number of Democrats, who until now were as united as Democrats can ever be in opposing the rollback, are jumping on the Republican sales tax bandwagon. If not a full penny, some are saying, a ha’penny will do.

Why? The reason stated out loud is that the one-cent increase imposed back in the hard times of the early ’90s was promised to be temporary and the Legislature must keep its promise.

The Legislature has made a lot of promises over the years: good schools, safe roads, clean water and air, effective law enforcement, a corrections system that does more than train better criminals and — the granddaddy of unkept promises — property tax relief. Keeping the promise that will do little more than lower the price of a compact disc by 15 cents or a new Lexus by $500 while it blows a $110 million hole in the budget is an odd choice. The leading alternative, a half-cent cut, would not only be a squandering of $55 million with little help to those most in need, it would be downright silly.

But the sales tax movement is gaining steam and the real reason is probably the worst one possible: politics. There’s not a politician anywhere who wouldn’t love to attach his or her name to a large tax cut and slicing a penny off the sales tax is easy. No deep thought is required, unlike the the kind of brain work that would have to go into reforming the income tax code or making the property tax less punishing to the land-rich, cash-poor folks in rural areas.

And, of course, 1998 is an election year. No politican wants to be labelled as having a problem giving the people back their $110 million. That would be one heavy albatross come November.

So what is needed is another way to look at it. Any legislator who favors cutting the sales tax should be required to defend that position by producing one elderly widow from the home district who had to sell her home because of the sales tax, a tragically common accomplishment of the escalating property tax. And then that legislator should be made to explain why, if anyone is to get soaked and gouged, it shouldn’t be the rich and the tourists.