Before they adjourned, Idaho lawmakers refused to even consider joining a league of states lobbying Congress to enforce sales taxes on the growing segment of retail sales conducted on the Internet and through catalogs.
Idaho loses about $83 million a year that way, even though the taxes are legally owed. And joining the Streamlined Sales Tax Project would net the state between $1.3 million and $2.1 million from firms willing to voluntarily remit sales tax receipts to the member states.
But doing so runs counter to the anti-tax guru Grover Norquist's counsel to "starve the beast" of government, thereby shrinking it to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.
Sounds like tax committee member Lenore Barrett, R-Challis, agrees.
"As far as the sales tax goes to the state, if we get it, we'll spend it and that has been the basic problem," she said.
Barrett may speak for nobody but herself, but House Assistant Majority Leader Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, shares the same view.
"The point is that everybody spends what they bring in. We will spend whatever we raise. If we don't bring in money, the size of government won't grow," he said. "In a year, we'll see that school kids will still get a good education, health and welfare will be OK, the world will not come to an end."
OK. But if Barrett and Bedke believe this, they need to change the law.
Ever since the sales tax passed in 1965, all retail purchases are subject to the tax. Idaho could exempt interstate commerce. That would exclude Internet and catalog sales. But it also would give chains such as Cabela's, J.C. Penney's and Sears, which offer catalog sales, a 6-percent advantage over mom and pop retailers that sell everything on site.
The outcome isn't hard to discern. Eventually, local retailers would disappear. With it would go much of the state's sales tax base.
Merely not enforcing the current law still amplifies the injustice of a regressive sales tax. People with low or modest incomes spend most of their money on necessities - groceries, clothes, medicine - and buy them at retail outlets. Customers with a little extra cash purchase extras online - music, books, concert tickets, wine, entertainment, specialty items.
Barrett and Bedke are not members of a rump minority. They're part of the GOP team that rules the Idaho House. If they want to cut spending, what's stopping them? To hear them talk, the Idaho Legislature is constantly within danger of a spending binge. Stop them before they hurt themselves, they seem to say.
No business would operate this way. Constantly cutting away at the product eventually leaves nothing for the customer to buy.
If Bedke, Barrett and their colleagues want to right-size government, they should explore where money is best spent and monitor how the investment pays off. They can't focus merely on how much or how little enters the pipeline.
Such a step, however, requires work. It demands learning what makes government tick, when programs succeed and what resources are truly needed.
Adopting a starve-the-beast philosophy does not. - M.T.
