Last week, Osama bin Laden said one way to get al Qaeda to cease hostilities against the United States would be for all Americans to convert to Islam.

We don’t see it happening, but he did offer an incentive to the anti-tax types on the right.

“There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat (alms) totaling 2.5 percent,” Osama said, according to the Fox News translation.

That’s got to have folks like Tom Jenney of the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers wondering what direction Mecca is in.

Last week, Jenney’s organization released a survey of county and local governments throughout Arizona regarding tax burdens. Turns out most local officials are Allies and Friends of Big Government and very few are Allies and Friends of the Taxpayer.

We have to admit that Jenney and his crew have done a lot of research into governments across the state. Too bad it’s basically a useless measuring stick because there’s no corresponding analysis of how those tax dollars are being spent.

Pima County Supervisor Ray Carroll got the organization’s Local Hero award for blocking a half-cent sales tax. Carroll’s fellow Republican, Ann Day, was also honored by the organization as a Champion of the taxpayer, while the Democrats on the board—Sharon Bronson, Richard Elias and Ramon Valadez—were called Champions of Big Government.

Of course, Day actually supported the half-cent sales tax, agreeing with Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry’s proposal that enacting a sales tax could allow the county to reduce its property tax burden while allowing the county to collect taxes from tourists and residents of outlying counties who shop in Pima County but don’t pay property taxes. But again, that’s a detail that’s too complicated for the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers to work into its analysis.

That’s the problem with an analysis that only gives you half the picture–the taxing, not the spending. Here in Tucson, Mayor Bob Walkup and the Democrats on the City Council all got labeled Allies of Big Government. And what’s that big, bad government doing with those spending increases? Well, it’s hiring cops and firefighters and paving neighborhood streets for the first time in too long. Does that mean government is out of control? Your mileage may vary, but we’d argue no.

Bottom line: Under AFT’s standards, Osama is a Champion of the Taxpayer.

Jonathan Chait has a new book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, that examines how this whole “taxes = bad” zeitgeist came to rule the Republican Party. The New Republic has an excerpt, along with a lively debate between Chait and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.

This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2007.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

8 replies on “Taxing Logic”

  1. I don’t understand what is so difficult to understand about taxes being evil. The private sector does everything better. For instance, if I want to go to the store, I merely take some of the money I minted myself from my own private bank, hire a road crew to build a private road directly from my walled compound to wherever it is I happen to want to go. Then I call up my private mine, have them dig up some iron ore, call my private SUV factory and have them design and build an overland vehicle for me to privately use on my own private road. That is only after I call my rubber farm in Chile (on a private phone line made from copper I mined myself)…

    I don’t even know why I am bothering to try to teach you communist jack-a-knapes how things are done IN THE REAL WORLD. I shall now retire to my compound where I speak my own private language. I DON’T NEED NO GOVERNMENT TO NOT DO NOTHIN’ FOR ME NO-HOW!

  2. I am with ya, Sprawn. Who needs police or roads or schools or health inspectors or air-traffic controllers, anyway?

  3. Can anyone ever truly “be with” anyone else, JB? We are all alone in the world. That is why I had to invent the English language entirely by myself and then teach myself to speak and write it in order to communicate with you here and now. I am greatly relieved that you happened to coincidentally teach yourself the exact same language… And it was also very difficult inventing electricity, electronics, circuit boards, microchips, etc… in an effort to build the computer myself out of parts and materials that I myself mined with no assistance from anyone else. You see, I am an INDIVIDUAL. And as an individualistic individual, like yourself, I know that collective action is evil in all its varieties. Now kindly excuse me, I have to:

    – repair my personal electric powerplant
    – dig my own personal sewer system
    – build my own personal F-16
    – to fight in my individual war with Iraq, while…
    – rewriting my individual building codes and
    – directing air traffic over my privately owned airspace
    – train my own personal doctor at my
    – own personal University staffed with
    – my own personal research wing…

    Busy day… busy, busy day here in my personal Utopia. But no need for Gubbamint Intrewsion.

  4. This is suspiciously similar to an item that appears in this week’s Skinny. I don’t mean to be critical, but did you run out of items for the Skinny and needed to troll your blog for a story?

  5. Retrorv: A lot of stuff that’s in The Skinny starts out here and is expanded upon in print; in this case, it was vice-versa.

  6. Thanks for the response Jimmy. Its nice to actually get a response from an editor or publisher-unlike the lame dailys. But if I have a choice (which I don’t) I’d prefer the expanded version in the Skinny.

  7. Retrorv: I just wanted to get in some links to make the Skinny bite more multi-media for all you alt.gen kids out there. It didn’t make much sense to plug the TNR piece in the dead-plant version. Think of it as value-added Skinny!

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