Date: Fri 07-Aug-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

Commentary-tax-rebate-Powell

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COMMENTARY: Tax Rebate Is A Gimmick, But It Benefits The Majority

By Chris Powell

For Connecticut taxpayers, the check is really in the mail -- about $123

million being sent to about 1.2 million people in amounts as large as $150,

amid some loud but not necessarily representative scoffing and pious

complaining.

Some of the complainers say they would rather see the money spent on

education, others on the state Department of Children and Families. Still

others argue that it should be applied to Connecticut's huge long-term debt.

And most of the complainers call the rebates a gimmick to improve the

political prospects of Governor Rowland, who would be the first Republican to

win a second term as governor of Connecticut in more than 50 years.

Yes, the rebate checks are a political gimmick -- and a wonderfully ironic one

besides, since there would be no easy mechanism for sharing state government's

surplus revenue with taxpayers without the state income tax. The income tax

has produced the better part of the surplus and is the same tax that the

governor pledged to seek to repeal during his last campaign and has so far

failed to do so.

But the rebates will have a more general political result that would be sound

irrespective of Rowland's reelection and the reelection of the Democratic

legislative leaders who acquiesced to the governor on the rebate idea and

whose signatures (not Rowland's) appear on the letters accompanying the rebate

checks.

That is, the rebates serve to reassert the long-lost primacy of Connecticut's

taxpaying class over the government and welfare classes after decades of

explosive increases in taxation, government spending, and, not so

coincidentally, social disintegration.

Spend the rebate money on "education" instead? "Education" as in, say, the

Hartford school system, which long has been mostly funded by the state rather

than by the city and bleeds money even as it produces the worst educational

results? Or "education" as in the lavish teacher salaries and benefits that

have been cannibalizing schools throughout the state for years?

Spend the rebate money on the Department of Children and Families instead,

even as every week produces horrific new evidence that government is only

facilitating child abuse with its coddling of the welfare and drug cultures?

Pay down the state debt instead?

Unlike the others, this complaint would have a chance at being persuasive if

it wasn't advanced by the same people who ran the debt up to its unhealthy

level. They spent and then taxed Connecticut into the ground and may be

suspected of wanting to prevent any political benefit from accruing to Rowland

more than they want state government restored to the sort of fiscal

responsibility they have always opposed.

In addition to tending to awaken the political sensibility of the neglected

taxpaying class, the rebates are great for offering the opportunity to test

the sincerity of the pious complainers. For if the complainers really think

that there are such better uses for the money, they don't have to accept it.

That is, they can endorse their checks back to the state and return them to

the state comptroller's office. Or they can use the money to make

contributions to charity or even to the political campaign of Rowland's

opponent in the gubernatorial election. A few actually may do the latter, but

it's unlikely that any will make similar contributions to the campaigns of the

candidates running against the Democratic legislative leaders who enacted the

rebate program and signed the letter accompanying the rebate checks. For the

complainers, the desire for good government is not likely to extend to

political bipartisanship.

The people complaining about the rebates are really arguing that Connecticut,

the highest-taxed state, still is not taxed enough. They are really arguing

that the ordinary people of no special wealth who finance most of the

government and ask nothing special from it should work even harder so the

government does not have to make laughably obvious but politically

inconvenient efficiencies at the expense of special interests. They are really

arguing for the continued supremacy of the government and welfare classes over

the taxpaying class, even for the supremacy of the state over the individual.

Political gimmick? Sure. But whose money -- whose government -- is it anyway?

And when is the last time most people got anything from that government

besides a bigger bill for services not quite rendered?

Besides, this is a strange time for the complainers to start worrying about

gimmicks, for government in Connecticut long has been full of them -- like

binding arbitration of public employee union contracts, subsidies for

childbearing outside marriage, tenure for teachers, the prohibition of

competitive bidding for public construction projects, anticompetitive price

regulations. The list of gimmicks in state government is almost endless.

The tax rebate is just the first gimmick that benefits the majority. That is

why it offends its opponents so. Connecticut could do a lot worse than to make

it a habit.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)