Margarett Edds, senior political writer for the Virginian-Pilot, can’t seem to understand the fuss about state and local taxes. In her column (requires registration) this morning, she writes:
Scan the political ads now clogging the airwaves, and you’d swear Virginians care about one thing: low taxes. Channel flipping during one segment of the nightly news last week, I caught barely a mention of education. The environment? Nary a word. Ditto for transportation and rising health care costs. But in the advertising run-up to Tuesday’s nominating primaries for statewide offices and the House of Delegates, the “T” word was everywhere.
… Good government means finding the right balance between taxes and services. It doesn’t take more than a half-hour before the television set to know that with the present crop of Virginia candidates, the emphasis is out of whack.
Imagine that. Virginians like keeping the money they earn. Selfish bastards. Where could such stinginess come from? Could it stem from the $1.4 billion in tax increases in the current biennial budget? Could it rise from the relentlessly rising property taxes that homeowners are paying across most of the Commonwealth? Could it reflect the fact that grandees from Senate Finance Chair John Chichester to Virginian-Pilot columnists are lecturing Virginians that they still aren’t paying enough taxes in a push for $1 billion-a-year (or more) tax increase for transportation funding in 2006?
Edds thinks there’s a problem when politicians “overemphasize low taxes.” I’d give her point of view a bit more credence if she occasionally wrote about strategies for taking the costs out of government — not cutting programs, but squeezing costs through process reforms, land use reforms, re-engineering, restructuring, whatever. But I don’t see much of that. It takes an effort to identify ways to cut spending and make programs run more efficiently. Any pea brain can raise taxes.