I agree that it’s a sucker’s bet to think that the Lege will try to fix Texas’ tax code in any meaningful way. Nobody likes having to take votes that may later be used as clubs against them in a campaign, and the lobbyists swarm like no other time when someone’s tax break is on the line. But such an overhaul has to happen eventually.
For Rep. Mike Villarreal, a San Antonio Democrat who serves on the House Ways and Means and Appropriations committees, it amounts to financial mismanagement by GOP Gov. Rick Perry and the Republican-dominated Legislature.
“Frankly, when you have a governor who says he will veto anything that even looks like a tax bill – even if it’s a reform of an existing, broken tax – it gives little reason for legislators to devote resources to proposing tax legislation,” Villarreal added.
Not that Villarreal and others haven’t tried.
Former Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, a Bryan Republican who is retiring from the Legislature, last year sought a revamp of the chronically underperforming business tax, warning that local school property taxes would otherwise rise. The business tax was expanded in 2006 to help pay for lower local school property tax rates, but it has fallen short of projections. Ogden also has called the exemption-riddled sales tax system a “rickety” thing.
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Villarreal has pushed to create a special commission to recommend exemptions ripe for elimination. It’s an uphill battle, he said, since tax code reform is “the right thing to do in the long term” but presents little short-term political gain.
“We do not scrub our tax code the way we scrub our budget. Every legislative session we open up the budget. We go line by line down the expenses that we approved in the entire session asking ourselves, ‘Is this working?’ ” he said. “In the tax code you can put an exemption in place and have it never be seen again.”
As I’ve said many times before, nothing will change until the state’s leadership changes. It makes no sense that tax expenditures never get the kind of scrutiny that every other kind of expenditure gets. To use the overworked analogy, it’s like going over your household expenses line by line every month, but never reviewing your investment portfolio to see what’s performing well and what isn’t. Of course, every exemption, exclusion, and loophole in the tax code was put there to benefit some interest group with the power to fiercely defend it, and that makes it a much harder fight. But we can see the consequences of avoiding that fight. Those chickens are going to roost whether we’re ready for them or not.
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