When did tax become a four-letter word?
Was it on Dec. 16, 1773, when Samuel Adams and his patriot gang, the Sons of Liberty, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of tea overboard to protest yet another tax on the colonies?
The anger was kindled over a law passed in Britain requiring the colonies to buy only British tea, which though cheaper than other teas available to colonists, did have a tax on it - a fact that the Sons of Liberty found intolerable, according to the History Channel.
So, disguised as Indians, the "patriots" embarked on what we now know as the Boston Tea Party.
Fast-forward 243 years and consider that Grover Norquist, founder of the group Americans for Tax Reform - aka a mover and shaker in today's movement known as the tea party - knows how to cut off his nose to spite his face. To Norquist and many other conservatives, it's all in the name of calling a tax profane rather than viewing it as the price of services. And, yes, sometimes even the price of freedom.
So enamored are our conservative state lawmakers with the sound of "no-tax" that Republican Gov. Bill Haslam's administration sought and received Norquist's "blessing" to vote on the governor's transportation proposal. That proposal includes Tennessee's first gas tax increase since 1989. The tax is needed because Tennessee has a $10.5 billion backlog in highway and bridge projects.
We all instinctively know that rutted, crumbling and too-narrow roads don't bring us new jobs. And we know falling bridges do bring us costly lawsuits and emergency expenditures. Bad roads and dangerous bridges are hardly the stuff of conservative values.
But Norquist and the tea party have built a cottage industry on making officials believe that voting for any expenditure called a tax is akin to killing your mother. Over the years, Norquist has extracted blood from state and federal lawmakers seeking his group's backing by persuading them to sign his "Norquist no-new-taxes pledge."
You'll recall that U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann couldn't support a tax on fuel for the barge users of the crumbling Chickamauga lock (a tax that barge owners and others were begging to be enacted before the lock could fail and close them out of business) until Norquist agreed to give Fleischmann an out: The magic words for Norquist was that the tax must be called a "user fee."
Note the tax itself didn't change - just what it was called. Meanwhile, we lost precious years - and dollars - while the lock repair was held up and inflation doubled and tripled the cost of any eventual fix.
The same thing is true of our roads. That $10.5 billion backlog in highway and bridge projects would have been cheaper to fix years ago - the first or second time our state leaders sought support for a gas tax increase.
Now that road building costs have increased and cars go farther on less gas, the current 21.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax passed nearly three decades ago is today worth about 11 cents a gallon. The governor's newest proposal, called the Improve Act, would increase "the road user fee" by 6 cents a gallon for gas and 10 cents a gallon for diesel. Additionally car registration fees would increase about $5. The average Tennessee motorist would spend about $4 more a month, according to state bean counters.
The Improve Act also would cut the sales tax on groceries, cut the investment tax on earnings from stocks and bonds and cut corporate taxes owed by large manufacturers.
On Monday, Norquist again let lawmakers kiss his no-new-tax ring. In a letter to state House and Senate members Norquist writes that the most recent iteration of the governor's bill represents a "net tax cut" and does not violate lawmakers' pledges to not raise taxes.
Doesn't that "net tax cut" sound too good to be true? You bet.
But equally unrealistic and probably downright ominous is Norquist's indication that his blessing also came with the Senate removal of the original bill's proposal linking fuel taxes to inflation - a provision that is all in the eyes of the beholder.
The Haslam administration pushed indexing fuel taxes to the Consumer Price Index (with a cap) to keep up with the rate of inflation and stop kicking the can down the road. But Norquist saw that provision as gas tax hikes "on autopilot."
As Benjamin Franklin taught us, only death and taxes are certain. Naturally we'd be hard put to find anyone who likes either of those certainties, but sometimes it's equally certain that our taxes have built a good state (one with no income tax) and a great nation - along with a great number of other things we take for granted. Like roads and the jobs they bring. Like public school education. Like public safety, sidewalks, parks, safe food, clean air, drinkable water.
We mustn't always think of tax as a four-letter word, but rather as the accountable investment we want to make to better our lives and ensure our children's future.
We're glad Sam Adams and his gang sparked the American Revolution. But Grover Norquist and his ilk are no more patriots than tax is a four-letter word. The sooner our state and federal leaders understand this, the better off we will be.