In the TV gothic soap “Dark Shadows,” an old New England family is plagued by the periodic returns of an unholy cousin from past generations, the undead Barnabas Collins. Recently, former Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky sought to add an episode to New Hampshire’s enduring income tax gothic soap opera by raiding a crypt in the dead of night and bringing back Barnabas in the form of another proposal to institute such a tax.
Rather than employ the methods of combating nosferatu dictated by mythology or superstition, GOP leaders have responded with a more practical political tactic: the stink bomb. A stink bomb is a statute, constitutional amendment or administrative rule that cannot, as a practical matter, be overturned when the bomber’s political opponents inevitably gain control at some point in the future.
Here, GOP leaders have reacted to Volinsky’s proposal by advocating a state constitutional amendment to ban an income tax or require legislative supermajorities to enact one. Their initial efforts fell short when a vote in favor of an amendment narrowly missed the required three-fifths majority in the House. They will get another chance when they take up a supermajority version of the amendment previously passed by the Senate. The Senate may also take up the outright ban that failed in the House.
Democrats inevitably will hold sway in Concord at some point in the future. Per what could be called The Ayotte Postulate — “New Hampshire is one election away from becoming Massachusetts” — it is imperative to enlist a stink bomb now to prevent those Democrats from making a Mass of things in the future via an income tax.
Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner Cinde Warmington has opposed income tax proposals, but does the lady protest too much? The income tax gothic soap opera inevitably requires future plot developments in which “unexpected” new “necessities” and exigencies require Democrats to demonstrate profiles in courage by abjuring their former purported opposition and embracing the tax.
Hence, the difference is between politicians who “oppose an income tax” and ones who “oppose an income tax (for now).” How reassuring do you find the latter?
The arguments in favor of the income tax are so predictable and pat that they sound like a statement read by a glassy-eyed prisoner of war. Remember, there was once a low tax New England state bordered by three high tax states. Under the familiar banners of “fairness” and “education,” it adopted a then small income tax as a means of reducing property taxes. The state was Connecticut, and its property and income taxes are now both among the highest. Thus, in addition to not Massing up New Hampshire, we need to avoid getting Conned.
GOP leaders promoting a stink bomb amendment to preclude an income tax need to be careful about exactly what they propose. In the future, the left will likely attempt incredibly imaginative, if disingenuous, Orwellian linguistic sleights of hand to work around any constitutional ban or limitation.
For example, Washington state has an effective constitutional ban on income taxes, originally the product of an era when sanity was still a common condition there, before caffeine and Microsoft lucre altered the state’s collective brain chemistry. Both the city of Seattle and the state have worked feverishly to find some language for a tax that is effectively a graduated income tax but not technically one. A recently enacted tax limited
to high income residents may finally become effective given the Democratic majority on the state’s Supreme Court.
If we are not careful in exactly how we word an amendment banning or limiting income taxes in New Hampshire, you can rest assured, future Democratic Supreme Court Justices will find that a tax on “earnings while breathing” is not an income tax because of the “while breathing” caveat.
Our contemporary New Hampshire Democrats are not your father’s New Hampshire Democrats or even your older brother’s. They are more aligned with the national party than their predecessors, and they cannot be trusted to resist falling in line with their masters on the last remaining issue, the income tax, on which they claim to be independent. The only prospective solution is to hold our noses, and drop a stink bomb.
Jonathan F. Mack is an attorney who lives in Hampton.