Hard-right Republican Tom McClintock is a three-time loser (state controller, governor, lieutenant governor) in California statewide elections. His libertarian views play well up in the mountains north of Sacramento, where he won a house seat by a razor-thin margin last fall. He is busily dropping a load of bollocks back East on gullible, susceptible, ill-informed and similarly minded audiences such as the conservative corporate-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute and Pacific Research Institute in Washington, D.C. The kind of people who empathize with anti-taxer Grover Norquist's desire to get government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
His speech caught the eye of an anti-tax group in Maine known as the Alliance for Maine's Future, which sent it around to a mailing list, which included a college friend who forwarded it to me.
By the way, in case my position isn't clear: taxes are the price we pay for civilization. We are not a heavily taxed nation, according to the statistics of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which ranks the U.S. tax burden as 14th out of its 30 member nations.
McClintock's speech is full of howlers. Because when you're an anti-tax libertarian, the problem is always too much government, never stupid propositions or vindictive Republicans in Washington, or George W. Bush's Great Depression II. Let me take just a few of old Tom's points:
- " One thing – and one thing only – has changed in those years: public policy." Not quite, Tom. In between California's Golden era of good roads and free universities, we got proposition 13 and the two-thirds requirement to pass a tax in the state legislature. Of course, Tom wouldn't mention those, because taxes are anathema. Taxes are never the solution. The sainted Reagan raised taxes as both governor and president, but never mind. Vote for a tax in the California legislature today, if you're a Republican, and your party's vengeance is swift: money for primary opponents and a loss of your leadership position in the legislature. What has "destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted" is the underfunding of government at all levels.
- "environmental Ludditism beginning in 1974." Of course, the water and air haven't gotten cleaner, and even if they have, where's the financial value of that? McClintock knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- "California’s unemployment numbers tracked very closely with the national unemployment rate. But since then, California’s unemployment rate began a steady upward divergence from the national jobless figures." There has been a divergence. The end of the cold war, which wiped out the Southern California aerospace industry, and the vindictive over-closure of California military bases, a GOP effort to punish the California congressional delegation, wouldn't have anything to do with that divergence, would it Tom?
- Tom doesn't like "the legislature’s response to Proposition 13." He is, I am sure, tickled pink at the real Prop 13 agenda. Screw the old folks about to lose their homes to taxes--that was just crap to feed the rubes. Jarvis and Gann (and McClintock) knew full well that was simply a stalking horse for Prop. 13's real goal: to shift the property tax burden from commercial to residential property. Reform would put $7.5 billion into the state's coffers. "30 years ago commercial property owners in San Francisco contributed 59 percent of property tax revenues and residential property owners contributed 41 percent. Today, it's almost exactly the opposite," says San Francisco Assessor Phil Ting. Jarvis and Gann must be dancing a jig up in heaven. Oh yes, and the other reason for Prop. 13 was to shrink government to "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
- The biggest howler of them all: "And I can assure you that the Laffer curve is alive and well. In the first two months after the tax increase took effect, state revenues have plunged 33 percent." Eight states had declines of that magnitude. Tom "Don't bother me with the fact" McClintock, insulated by personal wealth and his seat in Congress, apparently hasn't heard about the economic downturn.
I don't know what saddens me more; that McClintock runs around the country unloading this blarney, or that Maine's anti-taxers were impressed enough to redistribute it. McClintock's right about the effects; it's just that his blinders prevent him from seeing the actual causes.
