Rating Representatives

Monday, April 12, 2004

Page 7

CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY (Column)

Rating Representatives

By JON COUPAL

(The writer is an attorney and president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.)

While mob boss Frank Costello was testifying before the Kefauver Committee on organized crime he was asked if there was one thing he could point to that showed he had been a good citizen. After a brief pause, Costello replied, “Paid my taxes.”

Well, if paying taxes is a measure of good citizenship, then Californians are among the best citizens in the nation.

By any measure, California is a high tax state. While the average percentage of income going to state and local taxes in all states is 9.7 percent, in California it is 10.6 percent. By some calculations Californians rank seventh in per capita taxation, and virtually every method of gauging the tax burden shows California in the top 10, often competing for first.

Just how is it that taxes on Californians are so high?

Some taxes, especially at the local level, are approved by voters. The taxes that are approved may be the result of a true perceived need or the result of a well-financed or deceptive campaign by unions or other special interest groups.

The lion’s share of our heavy tax burden is directly attributable to state government and our own California Legislature. In 1991 the Legislature approved the largest tax increase in the history of the state. While taxpayers were promised that most of these new taxes would be temporary, we are still paying many of them, including a 1.25 percent increase in the sales tax.

More recently, the Legislature has imposed new taxes, often disguised as fees. But this is only a fraction of what they would do if taxpayers were not protected by Proposition 13’s requirement that new state taxes be approved by two-thirds of the Legislature. Just last year over one hundred bills were introduced that if approved would have raised taxes nearly $65 billion √- a fifty percent increase in the tax burden.

Where does such irresponsibility originate? What motivates apparently sane people to believe that there is a bottomless pot of money that they are free to dip into on a whim? Do they believe in leprechauns?

While it is easy to point fingers at a one legislator or another and say he or she votes against the interests of taxpayers, at the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers association we were determined to do the research so that we could base our evaluation of our 120 Sacramento representatives on a statistical analysis of their voting records.

This proved to be challenging since most tax-related bills never reach the floor of either the Senate or the Assembly unless the authors have counted noses and are assured of victory. This means that in most cases we had to rely on the record of votes in committee.

Lawmakers lost points when they voted for bills that would increase taxes, make it easier to increase taxes, threaten Proposition 13, or further tighten the bureaucrats’ lock on the budget. Their grades went up when they voted for legislation that benefited taxpayers like creating a mechanism for closing down unneeded bureaucracies and increasing the homeowners’ exemption. In all, 65 tax related bills that were considered in 2003, were used to develop a gauge of each politician’s way of thinking about taxing and spending.

The resulting “report card” was graded on a perfect bell curve, defined so that voting with the taxpayers less than 10 percent of the time resulted in a grad of “F” and those voting with taxpayers at least 90 percent of the time received an “A.”

The findings were disappointing if not surprising. The biggest block of legislators was comprised of complete failures with a definite tax-and-spend philosophy and no regard for California taxpayers. More than 44 percent received “F”s. Add in the 13 percent who received “D”s and we see that a solid 57 percent of the State Legislature voted against taxpayer interests most of the time.

While approximately 34 percent of lawmakers received “A” grades, only 8 percent earned “B”s or “C”s. From this we can see why pro-taxers worked so hard for Proposition 56, which had it passed last month would have replaced the requirement of a two-thirds vote to approve new state taxes with an easily attainable 55 percent. The Report Card on the California State Legislature shows that at any given time if a tax increase proposal is run up the flagpole, at least 57 percent of the Legislature can be counted on to salute. (The complete report card can be viewed by visiting www.hjta.org on the internet.)

And Frank Costello? Turned out he was lying and was convicted of tax evasion. But with the current atmosphere in the Legislature, Californians will continue to carry an excessive tax burden. And that◊s no lie.