Don’t look now, but it seems as though the General Assembly of the State of
Tennessee will actually summon up enough courage to consider a state income
tax on its merits and may even pass it.
At press time, anyhow, the auguries are good for a special
legislative session next week — the third of the last two years. The previous
ones, called by a dogged Governor Don Sundquist, were exercises in cowardice
and futility — ending without anything close to an agreement on a revenue
means whereby a state going bankrupt could escape red ink and somehow manage
to pay for its essential services.
In the abortive special sessions as well as in the last two
regular ones, the final obstacle to genuine tax reform was in the state
Senate, not the House of Representatives, whose leader, Speaker Jimmy Naifeh
of Covington, long ago signaled that the votes in his chamber were at hand,
for whatever it took. And recently Naifeh gave his endorsement to a specific
tax proposal.
This would be a 3.5 percent flat tax, subject to deduction from
the taxpayers’ federal returns and coupled with reductions in the state’s
prevailing sales tax, which is, by common consent, much too high already. The
tax would be instituted on July 1st, with a proviso — yet to be worked out —
that it be subject to an up or down vote by the people in the first,
experimental year of its operation. Altogether farsighted, sensible, and
democratic.
The good news is that the Senate leadership is in on the game
this time, unlike the case as recently as July, when senators allowed
themselves to be cowed by an unruly mob of tax protesters and backed away from
an emerging compromise measure much like the one being considered now.
All this comes at a time when the state’s fiscal situation,
already difficult enough, has become truly perilous, with estimates of next
year’s projected revenue shortfall — made worse by fallout from the recent
national catastrophe — ranging as high as $1 billion. It passed all
understanding when the legislature chose to adjourn each of the last two years
without putting the state’s books in order. As a result we have seen Draconian
cuts across the board in education, mental health, parks and recreation, to
name a but a few areas of service.
It would be the height of folly to continue in that mode. We
welcome the indications that the state’s legislators this time may choose to
forgo wearing the fool’s cap in the people’s name.
The Mayor’s Race
There was both bad news and good news in District Attorney
General Bill Gibbons’ decision not to run for county mayor. The bad news was
that we were deprived of what would have been yet another quality candidate in
a race that is shaping up as involving several. The good news was Gibbons’
refreshing indifference to running for the sake of running as well as his
demonstrated loyalty to the tasks already assigned him by popular vote. All
indications are that former city councilman John Bobango, a conscientious
public servant, will carry the Republican mantle cast aside by Gibbons. He
will join four well-qualified Democrats already in the race — banker Harold
Byrd, Public Defender A C Wharton, and two able legislators, Senator Jim Kyle
and Representative Carol Chumney. We have every reason to expect that issues
of consequence will be ably debated by these able individuals.
