We’re supposed to vote for this guy?
August 8, 2008 by chrisgraham
Fear and Loathing on the Trail column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
A generous guy, that Jim Gilmore is.
I got my hands on a piece of literature from the Gilmore Senate campaign that the local GOP was distributing last night at the Augusta County Fair. Quite rich, this thing was. It went into great detail about how much money households in Augusta, Staunton and Waynesboro saved in fiscal-year 2007 because of the car-tax relief plan initated by Gilmore during his term as governor from 1998-2002.
According to the literature, entitled “Car Tax Facts,” the average resident of the Greater Augusta area saved $262.57 in 2007 due to the relief plan, which used one of the more roundabout approaches to providing tax relief that we could devise.
It’s been awhile since we’ve had to discuss the details, so here’s a quick refresher. Gilmore couldn’t really do away with the car tax as his campaign placards had promised in 1997, because the car tax is not a state tax, but rather a local tax. He could’ve gone the route, one can suppose, of having the tax abolished through constitutional amendment, but the amendment process can prove quite wieldy, and in any case would have taken the entirety of Gilmore’s single four-year term to provide any tax relief. So the plan was not to actual tax relief, but to have the state reimburse localities for what was supposed to be a phased-out car tax. You got to write a smaller check to the local treasurer, your local government got its money back from the state, and everybody was in happily-ever-after land from there on.
The flaws in this should be obvious. First, the state has done what states will do, namely, it has shifted the burden of paying for the car tax effectively on somebody else, in this case the localities that rely on personal-property taxes, or car taxes, if you want to use the vernacular, as a primary source of local revenues. That ends up costing you in the form of tax increases at the local level; after all, somebody has to pick up the trash and pay the police officers to keep the streets safe and the rest.
Second, and really, to me, this is the big one, the fundamental flaw in this scheme - and I will pose this in the form of a question, because I had some law school, and enjoy being Socratic when I can. Where does the state get the money to pay localities for the reimbursement?
Yep, you guessed it, from us. We’re the state government, and we’re the local government. So what is happening is we’re paying $950 million a year right now in state taxes to reimburse localities $950 million to give ourselves these car-tax breaks.
Except that we’re paying more here in Greater Augusta than we’re getting back. And it shouldn’t be a mystery why that would be the case. Our car-tax rates here are a lot lower than what localities in Northern Virginia, in particular, assess on their taxpayers.
So what this means is that the average Greater Augusta household is paying $350 in state taxes to get $262.57 in car-tax relief. In addition to taking on more of a burden at the local level to make up for the reduction in state revenues to the local governments here that is harder to quantify, but not hard to notice.
If I were a higher-up in the Gilmore campaign, I’d pull back from making this an issue anywhere outside of NoVa. It’s obvious that we here in the hinterlands are getting utterly screwed by Gilmore’s Car Tax Facts. And this is supposed to make it so that we elect him to the United States Senate?
Dear Chairman of the Waynesboro Democratic Committee:
No doubt that you disagree with Gov. Gilmore’s Car Tax Cut. No Democrats advocate tax cuts, only tax increases. The Commonwealth’s budget has doubled since Jim Gilmore took office ten years ago.
Doubled, that is tax revenue or receipts have doubled since that time, and if you’d read the Car Tax Facts, with an unjaundiced eye, you would acknowledge that all those extra tax revenues were coming from state income taxes, from NOVA….
The job growth, and tax revenue growth is there, and simply Gov. Gilmore took that extra income tax revenue and transferred them to the rest of Virginia, allowing us to replace our local tax dollars with the extra revenue generated from THEIR…… excess in state income taxes….
Staunton, Augusta, Waynesboro income tax revenues have not exploded, like NOVA’s, Richmond or Hampton Roads….
We are hardly, and I mean hardly paying in more taxes, than we are receiving in relief……
Your solution is to no doubt, spend the $950 million dollars to fatten government and make every one in our region begin to pay the full car tax again…
Tell you what, you didn’t learn a lesson from your last defeat running for Waynesboro City Council… please, oh please, get full throated in campaigning on eliminating the Car Tax Cut in Waynesboro, so the citizens can show you again how much they want their taxes raised….
That is your challenge, should you choose to pursue that course…. put out your own piece on repealing the Car Tax Cut, and include in it how Warner promised to continue the phase out of the Car Tax, but lied to Virginians, and stopped the repeal cold, claiming Virginia couldn’t afford it.
Get Senators Chichester and Potts to your Democrat meetings, and then ask them to show their faces at our GOP meetings……
That would just be grand, if you want to discuss issues…..
For all of Mr. Green’s bluster, he has failed to address the substance of my argument. The no-car tax plan of Jim Gilmore ends up costing Greater Augusta residents more in what they pay in state taxes than they get back in local tax refunds. He conjures up the image of “all those extra tax revenues” coming from NoVa without acknowledging that two-thirds of the car-tax relief is going to NoVa. He would have you believe that the car-tax relief monies were distributed equally throughout the state when in fact this is not at all the case.
I would normally say here that I would expect him to know that, but actually I wouldn’t expect him to know that. As well-meaning as he is, and I don’t ascribe to Chris any ill will, despite his repeated personal jabs at me, he’s just a party hack. Which is to say, his knowledge of basic facts and data as pertains to campaigns and elections is just what it needs to be to put out propaganda pieces like he did here. That doesn’t make him a bad person in my eyes. I know that he’s just trying to do what he thinks is right.
I do have an issue with the misimpression that he left above about my stance on tax relief. I did as a city-council candidate propose a tax decrease, and for whatever reason, when the tax decrease that I advocated came up for a vote by the city council here this spring, it was rejected by the current conservative majority on our council. That is a well-known fact to those who regularly read this column, and I would suggest that Mr. Green and his fellow propagandists consider doing a bit of oppo research before making blanket statements of this nature in the future.
Show their faces at a GOP meeting? I can not wait for the day when reason comes back into the debate and this broken two party system is exposed for what it really is, a pissing match between to groups of people who care nothing about the people.
I see somewhere we can cut taxes. Spankthedonkey, this excess state income raised? Why is their excess and it is to lower taxes, where is my rebate check? I get tired of hearing how the state or local government is saving tax dollars and yet it just gets obsorbed back into the machine. When it comes to taxes the state or the federal government dont mind taxing too much, but what do they do with the money.
They are like a church, always accepting money no matter devalued the currency no matter what the season. Its always in season to rape the tax payers.
What is wrong with government, it is a machine running on auto, with the sole purpose of removing the middle class and making things really nice for the rich pricks who have the money to lobby the other rich pricks.
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