By Dan Carpenter TheStatehouseFile.com
INDIANAPOLIS – You can call it a mountain laboring to give birth to a mouse: weeks of posturing and parrying over a “signature†tax proposal that only slightly turns the screws of a failed status quo.
Dan Carpenter is a columnist for TheStatehouseFile.com and the author of “Indiana Out Loud.â€
You can call it an affirmation of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting – or promising – a different result.
Either way, the Great Business Tax Cut Showdown appears to have resolved itself pretty much in keeping with the rest of the results of the 2014 Indiana General Assembly session – with lots of room for relief and self-congratulation on both sides and little of substance accomplished for a state in dire need of some economic democracy.
The compromise that Gov. Mike Pence has indicated readiness to accept phases in the reduction of an already ludicrously low corporate tax rate, with options for local government entities to decide on personal property tax cuts — and supposedly, insulation against an estimated $1 billion hit to budgets that already can’t fix streets and pay police and teachers.
Whether the $1 billion figure is accurate, the loss would be real money, as distinct from the billions in new investment and job creation for which Indiana’s serial gifts to the top echelons have consistently left us waiting.
Cut corporate taxes, eliminate the inheritance tax, cripple collective bargaining, shovel contracts and subsidies into every scheme that comes from the well-connected, and voila! The Pence-Daniels-Bosma miracle, envy of Illinois, a businessman’s paradise with high unemployment, high poverty, low buying power, poor health, a sickly environment and municipalities on life support.
Einstein’s definition of insanity. It shouldn’t take a genius.
When one is governed by men whose imagination begins and ends with privilege and partisanship, one learns to be thankful for anticlimax.
No chance for marriage equality in Indiana, unless and until the federal courts intervene; but at least the law is unlikely now to be reinforced by a constitutional amendment. A pathetically timid preschool pilot, but at least the Trojan horse of voucher expansion got removed from it.
Mass transit for Central Indiana that may have to have bake sales and car washes to pay the fare, but at least it’s out of the station.
Egregious, probably unconstitutional, religion-based restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion; but with loopholes through which a woman may pursue her rights.
Guns in schools, if locked in the trunk. They’re already there, of course; but the National Rifle Association needs a token of love every year.
For the most part, it’s a good thing that big ideas are not the forte of this big GOP majority. The entire education and criminal justice systems might be run by the Walton family by now.
On the other hand, we’d have health care for roughly 400,000 low-income Hoosiers – at Washington’s expense – if fear of administrative adventure and Barack Obama weren’t keeping our governor from pulling the trigger as our “backward†cousins in Kentucky happily have done. And if we wanted to inject fuel into the economy where the tanks are empty, the legislature could raise the minimum wage. That’s an area where, not so long ago, we actually were ahead of Washington, with both parties on board.
Oh well. We got God and guns as usual, but not too much of either. Pretty light on the guts as well, which, by the standards we progressives set for this Statehouse, makes us three for three.
Dan Carpenter is a freelance writer, a contributor to Indianapolis Business Journal and the author of “Indiana Out Loud.â€
