Luis Torres smokes a cigarette outside the New York City Housing Authority’s Chelsea-Elliot Houses where he lives, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015, in New York. The Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule Thursday to require the more than 3,100 public housing agencies across the country to make their properties smoke-free. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)Also read
* Push for referendum on cigarette tax to fund arts projects fizzles
Smoking for arts has burned out.
And rightly so.
If a sin tax is going to fund something, it should be along the lines of care for the sinners, not the aesthetic enhancement and entertainment of folks who frequent art shows and the symphony – even if part of the tax was earmarked to make the arts more available to the least among us.
But the worst thing about a recent failed proposal to let Hamilton County voters decide whether to approve a 20-cent-per-pack cigarette tax for arts projects was that our county commissioners didn’t even have the backbone to take a public vote on it. Even though that public vote would have been just the preliminary step needed to ask our local state delegation to put the question of a Hamilton County specific tobacco tax ballot before the Tennessee General Assembly.
Instead, Hamilton County Commission Chairman Chester Bankston put the letter with a request to our delegation out on a table at the courthouse for commissioners to sign. The letter needed six signatures from the nine members of the county commission to garner the needed two-thirds majority.
In the end, the letter attracted too few signers, and some of the non-signers said our local state lawmakers waved them off because they were cool to the idea.
House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga, said he wanted commissioners to vote publicly and not just sign a letter requesting legislation. Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, and chairman of the county’s legislative delegation, said the money from the tax would better be put toward indigent health care or the hiring of art teachers for local K-12 education.
Frankly, that’s a great idea – the only better one might be that the state fully fund education so schools can hire art, music, math and English teachers!
The bottom line, of course, is the bottom line.
Every single one of our leaders knows in their hearts that we have more needs than we have tax money. And more tax needs than we have the backbone to talk about. Gardenhire, at least, acknowledged that, noting that Tennessee faces a number of tax questions in coming months, most pressing is a possible gas tax increase.
What the smoking-tax letter points up so clearly is just how much easier it is to pass the tax buck – and the blame for the tax bill – over, or back, and back again – to the next elected body.
At least Commissioner Joe Graham was upfront about some portion of the shell game involving the tax-increase request: “It should be done publicly – not on a sheet of paper [the letter] in the back room” at the courthouse, he said.
By the way, Tennessee smokers already pay a statewide tax of 62 cents per pack.
Maybe we taxpayers should seek a referendum for an “officials” tax on the elected seats – the very chairs – of our local and state leaders.