Having your cupcake and taxing it, too

Let’s say you woke up from wherever you found yourself sleeping last New Year’s morning and resolved that 2007 was the year you would finally, absolutely, bet-the-children’s-piggybanks give up cigarettes and lose 25 pounds by year’s end. But you knew that if you quit smoking you would certainly crave more sugary snacks, thereby hurting your weight-loss regime.

Now it is June. Nearly half a year has gone by and your progress has been negligible because you don’t want to quit smoking and risk weight gain, but you haven’t really started your diet because there’s no sense worrying about a few extra pounds if you’re giving yourself lung cancer.

The next decision you make on this will determine not only your physical fitness but your fitness for state office. Can you compromise by quitting the butts and accept some temporary weight gain that will mean losing not quite as much as you had pledged? Or do you keep mulling this conundrum in the belief that if you think about it long enough an easier choice will magically appear?

Like, I don’t know, an early grave.

The Legislature is confronting something similar on the other half of the death and taxes truism – specifically, does it modify and pass a badly needed tax-reform bill, a bill that would deliver $96 million in breaks to small businesses and a 30 percent chop to income taxes to residents, if that bill also causes short-term discomfort to a minority of residents? Or does it do what it has done for 25 years and await a perfect bill that would cause no pain to anyone and could be passed changing neither jot nor tittle?

The tax-reform bill may be the final major legislation of a session remarkable for its collegiality and accomplishment. It, like a bond package, the state budget and, within the budget, the school-district consolidation plan, has been a bipartisan fiesta of good feeling.

Maine residents have been hearing about tax reform for so long that they would be excused from paying attention to the latest attempt, but Taxation Committee Republicans such as Randy Hotham and Richard Nass and Democrats such as John Piotti, Joseph Perry and Ethan Strimling have been working on various proposals since January. They have come up with some fine ideas.

After a remarkably open process, the Tax Committee offered this: Cut the income tax rate from 8.5 percent to 6 percent and simplify filing; expand property-tax relief through the Homestead and Circuit Breaker programs. These would be paid for by expanding the sales tax, which would reduce the state’s dependency on car and building supply sales and shift about $140 million of the tax to visitors; increase the real estate transfer tax, the corporate tax and the meals and lodging tax. Yesterday, the Senate moved a stripped-down version of a constitutional amendment to require a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to raise or lower a tax.

But all week, the committee had been met by gaggles of lobbyists from businesses affected by increasing taxes; members of a Republican leadership looking for deeper tax cuts; and a reluctant governor, who would have preferred to relive the school-district consolidation fight than go through tax reform. A clash between House and Senate Democrats further complicated the issue – an example between one body, the House, in which the party had a large majority, and another where the majority was paper thin.

Naturally, the businesses affected by the new taxes hated them the way you, with your New Year’s resolution, might hate stowing the cupcakes and cigarettes. And naturally a hard-working and unusually cooperative Legislature spent this week trying to find some combination of tax rules and restrictions that would satisfy both parties and the hovering lobbyists. The combination exists but only if the Legislature can stay focused on a couple of ideas.

First, the most important part of the reform is dropping the income-tax rate substantially. Second, a more stable sales tax that pushes more taxes onto tourists is highly desirable but not as important as the first point. Third, passing a reform package does not end the discussion; it opens it up for further changes next session – especially if an alert lawmaker adds language to the bill to ensure it has a second act.

The options for getting what matters from this package into law are apparent: narrowing the sales-tax expansion, dropping local-funding provisions, looking at a penny increase on the sales tax, even if that means members of the Tax Committee must give up some items to protesting lobbyists.

But as with better nutrition and healthful living, the day you vote to change is not nearly as important as all the days that follow, when the false choice of what held you back for so long seems almost comically sad in retrospect.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. Readers may contact him at tbenoit@bangordailynews.net.