Tax and Gouge Task Force

Facing a state budget deficit, declining revenues and the desire to continue spending, Gov. Mead asked, "What constitutes a rainy day?" This thinly veiled call to raid the state's rainy day account to fund his spending priorities was ignored by the legislature. Instead, the legislature began the search for more revenues by developing a task force called Vision 2020. But if the legislature keeps its focus on revenue mining instead of spending withdrawal, it is merely delaying the rainy day fund raid –or worse, it is leaving a legacy of debt and higher taxes to our children and grandchildren.

The 2020 initiative has a rather unpromising beginning. Vision 2020 creates an expenditure and revenue review panel comprised of past governors, the House speaker, the Senate President, past appropriations committee chairmen and the legislature's management council, precisely the people who got us into this spending addiction in the first place. The task force's job is to review state expenditures, revenues, tax exemptions and permanent and non permanent savings.

Although this sounds like a good idea, the focus seems to be on how to reform the tax system to grab more money from the pockets of the people of Wyoming.

The small mention of expenditure in the legislation focuses on: "agencies or programs identified by management council as having the highest rate of growth over the past decade." It seems logical, given that expenditures doubled over the past 10 years, that the focus should be on what has grown the most. But perhaps the task force should first define the fundamental role of government and then focus cuts, assuming there will be any, in activities beyond that role.

Here's a suggestion.

One spending area ripe for withdrawal is taxpayer funded handouts to private businesses. The underlying notion here is that government can pick winners and losers in the economy better than citizens spending their own money. One way government tries to pick winners is to transfer money into the pockets of its special favorites that it has picked from its own citizens.

Governments in every state use other people's money to bribe businesses to town, and use job creation as the rationale. The latest government favorite, the data center, is a good example. Microsoft, for instance, received $7.25 million in "Managed Data Center Cost Reduction" grants for its initial data center and first expansion to help lower its electricity and broadband costs. This comes, ironically, as the family electricity bills skyrocket. Microsoft also received a $5 million Governor's Data Center Recruitment Fund handout, meaning it got tax dollars to prepare the ground for the facility. Its total state subsidy was $12.75 million. The City of Cheyenne chipped in another $1.5 million to set up a renewable fuels project. For the 27 jobs created in the first two phases of the project, Microsoft received subsidies of more than $14 million, almost $520,000 per job.

And as we see in the case of Microsoft, picking favorites is an expensive and ineffective job-creation tool. That's because handing out tax dollars to businesses is not the role of government. All government can do, and should do, is create an attractive investment climate and a level playing field so businesses can compete for our dollars in a fair environment.

Now, as we teeter on the brink of the fiscal cliff, government has a good excuse to extract itself from bad spending programs like corporate welfare. The time is right because let's face it, the government cannot offload its cost, bloated by 10 years of severance tax windfall revenue, to the general taxpayer of the state — there just aren't enough of us.

As severance tax revenue falls, government must shrink down to a level people are willing to fund. It must not raid the rainy day fund. It must not shift the burden of bad spending policies to the pocketbooks of Wyoming families.