Written by: Jim Hansen
Monday, October 08, 2007

For years, Idaho's legislators have given special tax breaks to powerful corporate interests. When viewed in isolation, each tax break tended to look good. When viewed against objective criteria that weighed them collectively against all other public investments that could benefit all Idahoans, the tax breaks tended to look narrow and unnecessary. Of course, legislators were not encouraged to use objective criteria so over time each new tax break piled on top of the ones before gradually robbing our tax system of fairness.

The steady rise in Idaho's sales tax rate to make up for the lost revenue created by all these exemptions illustrates how imbalanced the system has become. It also prompted more and more people to demand that the legislature actually measure all exemption against objective criteria and repeal those that don't stack up.

Last week, a committee of legislators at least gave more than lip service to the idea and actually voted to support applying 14 existing and all future tax exemptions against a a list of eight criteria of fairness, who benefits, and how are public revenues affected.

The committee even went a little further and recommended that four of the 14 don't stack up and should be repealed.

This is a good first step. The interim committee only voted to make these "recommendations" to the legislature that will convene in January.

It is up to all of us make sure every single legislator has read those criteria, has read the list of exemptions that should be repealed and/or evaluated and should tell us whether they will act or whether they will buckle under pressure from corporate lobbyists and let them slide.

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