If you think Amendments 60 and 61 and Proposition 101 are simply
asking us whether we should be paying fewer taxes, you’re missing
the point.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees with the idea
that tax reform is needed.
So then the question becomes how should tax reform happen, and
that what’s at the heart of the ballot questions.
These three measures approach tax reform from the standpoint of
sweeping constitutional amendments, the idea being that voters must
take the tax reform bull by the horns because our elected officials
aren’t.
This, in our opinion, is a tremendously oversimplified approach
to tax reform.
Taxes are complicated. They feed funds and pay for services
we’re not aware of. In fact, it’s doubtful anyone knows how every
tax relates to every public service. There is no global view of
taxes and it took a long time for them to become the tangled mass
of expenses they are now.
Fixing all of it will be a tedious process. It needs to be. It
will take time to figure out exactly what will be lost when a tax
is cut and the ramifications of that cut, and what will be lost
needs to be understood before we act.
Government officials are pumping out information about what will
be lost if 60, 61 and 101 pass. Truth be told, we think these ideas
are simply hypotheses. These measures have impacts no one can
accurately predict.
But that only speaks to the problems with these ballot
questions. They don’t offer room for that kind of analysis real tax
reform needs, which is why they are a bad idea.
The only good that can come from these questions is that their
appearance on the ballot may serve as a call to action for elected
officials to work on real tax reform, but that’s as far as these
questions should go.
We elect people to tackle these issues in informed ways, to put
the time and effort into understanding how government works and how
it should change for the better without a lot of collateral damage.
Ballot questions like 60, 61 and 101 takes the power away from
elected officials to do that job correctly and saddles us with
unintended consequences that no one bargained for.
Vote no on 60, 61 and 101.
