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January 13, 2012

Tax plan is a bad move

Dalton Daily Citizen

Wrong tax. Wrong time. Wrong solution.

That was the message Dalton Mayor David Pennington delivered Thursday at a rally in Atlanta hosted by Georgia Tea Party activists.

Pennington was talking about a group of regional sales taxes that Georgians will vote on in July.

The General Assembly essentially coerced local governments into putting the sales tax vote on the ballot by tying the matching funds they will have to pay of transportation projects to the tax. If regional officials didn’t put the tax on the ballot, the state would have required them to match state funding 50 percent. In those that hold a referendum, and all will, the local match will be 30 percent if voters reject the tax and 10 percent if they approve it.

Pennington is right on all three counts.

This is clearly the wrong time for any tax increase, much less what would be the largest tax increase in the state’s history if the sales taxes pass in every region in the state.

Georgia is just slowly starting to climb out of a what has been the longest and deepest recession for the state since the Great Depression. The jobless rate in the Metro Dalton area, Whitfield and Murray counties, remains above 11 percent.

Of course, down in Atlanta, they seem to think prosperity is already here. Gov. Nathan Deal, for instance, has proposed a $900 million increase in state spending for the next fiscal year’s budget.

But the economic picture doesn’t seem as bright to those of us without a politician’s glasses, and a massive tax increase could easily choke off what little economic growth the state has seen.

This is clearly the wrong tax. Whitfield and Murray counties are in the 15-county regional covered by the Northwest Georgia Regional Commission, and we’ve watched over the past several months as regional officials have put together the list of projects the tax would fund in this area. As Pennington noted in his Atlanta speech, they tried very hard to match the amount of spending that each county would receive to the amount of taxes each would generate. Politically that makes sense. Residents of Whitfield County, for instance, likely aren’t going to vote for a tax if the bulk of the money goes to other counties.

But the process created a list that is essentially a grab bag of projects in each county, not a set of vital projects of regional significance. The truth is the $1.2 billion the tax is expected to generate over the next 10 years is much more than is needed to fund truly vital regional projects, so our leaders went looking for things to spend the money on.

And that’s why it’s the wrong solution. The state does have serious transportation needs. Traffic congestion in the Metro Atlanta area is clearly such as issue, as is the need to deepen the port of Savannah.

We need plans to specifically target those needs, not a major tax increase that will simply give politicians more money to funnel to their friends in the construction industry.

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