Editorial: A Tax Cut is a Tax Cut, a Tax Hike is a Tax Hike

At heart, even an honest politician is a salesperson, and as salespeople go, they occupy a high level on the shelf. Far above the door to door vacuum guy, the Avon girl, even the car lot pros, elected officials must be among the best of the best when it comes to selling the sizzle when they ain't got no steak.

Like the jobs of the best commercial salesman, their task is to sell a concept rather than a gadget. They promote a vision of what something they want will become. They are not holding up a widget and showing how well it works. A slick-talking silver tongue is not only useful, it's a job requisite.

However, I've always been dissapointed by their lack of creativity. Most of their pitches for or against something are so uniform and predictable. Come up with some way to mischaracterize anything you have a hard time selling and roll it back out as a "new and improved" model. In the parlance of their arena: Put some lipstick on that pig and send her back out there.

In today's budget challenged environment, the most common misnomers I see, usually relate to "raising" taxes. Now I use words for a living and would think that misrepresenting something so mathmatically defined with tricky semantics would be a stretch and to those endowed with common sense it might be, but even I am impressed with how deftly they are often able to mislead the people who sign their checks.

The best example is the tax cut they sell as a temporary measure. All debate is focused around this limitation when it is installed, because it is designed to be put in place as a temporary tax cut for a specific purpose. However, anyone who allows them to expire as they are intended to do, is immediately accused of raising taxes, simply by allowing something to do what the sales guy who paned it off on them said it was supposed to.

The "temporary" Bush tax cuts are a great example. When proposed, they were a better way to spend a surplus than addressing social security, Medicaid, or god forbid – the deficit. Nonetheless, when endless war and rampant spending made the surplus the administration had inherited disappear, anyone who voted against making them permaneant was said to be raising people's taxes. Now that seems counterintuitive, even nonsensical, but I heard it said and repeated over and again, by supposedly educated and intelligent people.

The new bait and switch involves a tax hike that's supposedly not really a tax hike, because the value of what is being assessed (your home) has fallen. The rate increases (a tax hike), but the amount you pay remains the same, and therefore you they say you haven't experienced a hike, when it's simple math, though simple may be an overstatement.

While it might be fair to point out the relationship between declining values and increasing rates, to say it is not a tax increase is intellectually dishonest. People's assets are being devalued from retirement accounts to personal investments, and obviously home equity. Add in a pay-cut, which many Americans have recently experienced and you can see that when the few expenses likely to go down don't, it makes even less sense to suggest that the rate isn't as meaningful as the bill.

I can see the logic in trying to argue that raising millage rates during such times, might not be as painful or even noticed, but sell it to the people honestly for what it is, a tax hike. Next year's budgets are likely to look worse and this sort of band-aid will be tougher to pull off, especially when people feel as though they were bamboozled the year before. Let's have honest and open debate and to do that, we need to call a spade a spade.

Follow our series on local budgets and proposed tax hikes all week long at the Bradenton Times, starting tomorrow.