State Sen. Marsha Blackburn has been roundly thumped since Thursday for having the audacity to alert the public to the fact that a state income tax, like the Phoenix, or, if you prefer, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, was breathing again—at least in legislative back rooms. It’s a bum rap. Her office’s calls to WLAC talk-show host Phil Valentine and WWTN’s Steve Gill were indeed part of the spark for Thursday’s demonstration, but a spark is useless without fuel, and the state’s leadership had been providing plenty of that for years.
“All an income tax does is raise the tax burden on Tennesseans and create a way to finance the easy and endless expansion of government,” Gov. Don Sundquist said once in his pre-income-tax-supporting days. Nevertheless, he now supports an income tax, and his budget proposals have expanded from $13 billion to $20 billion since he took office. Lt. Gov. John Wilder signed a campaign pledge against an income tax. We all know where that stands. Legislators’ statements that the levy was dead and that debate would be public have likewise proven untrue. Finally, last Thursday, the tax had crawled back onto the table once too often.
“The sneaky manner in which it was attempted infuriated people,” Valentine says, “and they headed downtown to show their disgust.”
The message for the governor and lawmakers was this: “Get your damned hands out of my pockets until you can convince me you know how to manage money.”
Underlying that is a philosophy often ignored in the media or unfairly presented as simplistic and hard-hearted. It is a specific application of basic conservative ideology, which holds that government is best when it is small, limited, and viewed with suspicion. People are, as a matter of nature, corruptible, and any influx of money allows ever-increasing opportunities for corruption. It’s too easy for politicians to buy votes with it, to throw it at a problem without attaching fiscal responsibility to it (read TennCare), or to spend it ineffectively. (The state’s education budget has increased about 80 percent in the last 10 years, with little to show for it.) When it is given as aid, it is often seen as enabling the very behavior that caused the need.
Politicians are money junkies. They need it to run for office, and once there, they will run through everything the taxpayers give them and ask for more, regardless of current tax levels. The arguments for or against a state income tax pale in light of the larger fact that an income tax represents, on its face, a new credit card issued to the Legislature and funded by the Tennesseans who actually bring home paychecks. Few conservatives bought the rhetoric that most Tennesseans would pay less under an income tax plan. That might be true for a year, but taxes generally rise, and they are virtually never repealed. States that lower one tax to install another invariably raise it again. And it is never enough.
In 10 years, the total state budget has grown 96 percent, including federal dollars. “If you’re increasing spending at four or five times the rate of inflation, it is not a revenue problem. It is a spending problem,” Gill says.
Demonstrators attacked this impending threat by ensuring that legislative hijacking of more taxpayer money would be as unpleasant and unrewarding for legislators as possible. Despite a few feeble claims that the demonstrators could not be credited for helping to beat back the tax, the protestors’ efforts worked.
Focused by talk radio, conservative Tennesseans have become one of the state’s more compelling and successful lobbying groups, and it is obvious that legislators now take the power to tax more seriously than they did last week.
As for the use of the words “mob” or “riot” in connection with Thursday’s events, it is hooey. I was there. There was a bit of glass breakage, which is, of course, regrettable and inexcusable, but the overwhelming majority of people behaved very well—as did most of the police. No crowd that is liberally laced with children whose parents are confident of their safety can be called a mob.
Still, given the volume and the anger inside, some legislators were unnerved. In fact, it sounded, in post-demonstration interviews, like Republican Sen. David Fowler, an income tax opponent, had had it. During a long interview with Gill, he said he was frightened—to the point of considering leaving the Legislature—by some spittle-flecked loudmouth yelling at him. It’s a good thing the senator is not an employer who regularly faces pickets in strike situations.
Despite the talk shows’ roles as catalysts in the gathering, Gill is convinced reaction to them has been wrongheaded.
“The demonization of talk-show hosts by this administration has caused us to be blamed for more than we deserve and to get more credit than we deserve,” he says. “I can scream all day that people need to go down and protest the legislative budget on wildflowers and you wouldn’t have five people turn out. I can’t get people to do things they’re not passionate about.”
And he too dismisses the words “mob” and “riot.” “Although,” he says, “if you can call the budget they passed, which increases spending by twice the rate of inflation, a bare-bones budget, then I guess you can call that a riot.”
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