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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

5/15/2002

Waiting Game
Speaker Jimmy Naifeh apparently lacked the votes for his income tax Wednesday or he surely would've run it in the House. Meanwhile, an alternative tax plan, involving eliminating sales tax exemptions, wasn't voted on by the full House after its authors delayed so the bill's fiscal impact could be calculated for certain, and support could be rounded up to pass it. The House doesn't go back into session until Wednesday, May 22.

That's the good news.

The bad news is, a majority of the House seems bent on increasing government revenues to match the bloated spending requested by the governor, rather than tailoring spending to fit within existing revenues. That means the House is looking for a way to raise revenue, and right now an income tax is one of two plans getting attention. The income tax is still a threat.

The best outcome, of course, would be neither tax increase passes and the House, out of time, just passes a slimmed-down spending plan that lives within existing revenues (or perhaps comes close, and patches the difference with an increase in the cigarette tax.) Despite the bleating bureaucrats and the protests of Gov. Spendquist that we can't do any sort of cutting, and certainly not some across-the-board cut of, say, 5 percent in all departments, It is doable. Two states west of here, Oklahoma, which has an income tax, is dealing with a revenue shortfall by cutting spending - with a 16 percent cut possible.