Category: Tom Baxter

Taxes should be simple and fair. You hear that mantra a lot these days, and it has a special power around this time of year. The more I meditate on it, the more my mind is drawn toward the raging irony that the simplest and fairest tax my household pays, the state income tax, is the very one which some seem hell-bent on getting rid of.

Start with simple. Like thousands of Georgians, I use a computer tax preparation program to file our federal and state taxes every year. The federal taxes are a pain, especially since I pay self-employment tax and have to send Uncle Sam a check for estimated taxes four times a year.

But our state income taxes are literally as simple as pushing a button. It takes less than a minute for the program to compute my state tax after the drudgery of calculating the federal income tax is finished. And it’s a pleasant interlude, because this year, like last year and several years before that, we’ve had to write the federal government a check for more money while we’ve received a refund from the state.

It’s a fact not much remarked on that the closest thing to a frontrunner we have so far in the squishy-soft field for next year’s U.S. Senate race in Georgia is a Democrat.

There’s good reason no one pays much attention to a couple of polls from February showing former Sen. Max Cleland leading every Republican contender. He’s shown no interest in the race, and even the names being seriously discussed — U.S. Rep. John Barrow and Michelle Nunn — haven’t made any commitments.

And yet there are several reasons why next year’s Senate race may be more important in the long run for the Democrats than the Republicans, win or lose.

Here’s one way to estimate the chances of getting Tennessee to change its mind and give up a thin strip of its existing territory so Georgia can gain access to the water in the Tennessee River.

Right now, the Tennessee legislature is considering a bill that would end party primaries for U.S. Senate nominees, and give the Republican and Democratic legislative delegations the power to choose their respective nominees.

The idea of giving up some of their existing territory for our convenience has so far met with overwhelming resistance in Tennessee. But you figure, if they’re fools enough to go for the idea of giving up the voters’ right to select their U.S. Senate nominees, we just might be able to talk them out of that land without a fight.

Jimmy Lewis is a man known for dire predictions.

The CEO of HomeTown Health, which represents more than 50 rural Georgia hospitals, he peppers his regular email messages to his clients with urgent warnings to hoard every penny of cash they can get their hands on, and as a lobbyist his testimony has caused the chair of one committee to complain that he always says the sky is falling.

Ominously, his predictions are starting to come true. Lewis forecast at the beginning of the year that five to six rural hospitals might be forced to close in 2013, and already there have been two. Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington closed in February, and Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland shut its doors last week.

Nearly every discussion about Georgia’s economic future begins at the top, with high-tech companies like Digirad, the medical imaging firm which recently announced it’s relocating its headquarters to Atlanta, or prime industrial plums like the KIA plant in West Point.

But a provocative report by a new group, the Essential Economy Council, argues that the upper tiers of the state’s economy rest on a cluster of low-end economic sectors, not connected to each other in earlier studies, which face severe challenges in the years ahead.

“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan wrote five decades ago. There could be no better proof of the lasting relevance of that observation than the way I watched the debate on Georgia’s municipal broadband bill last Thursday night.

I’ve spent countless hours watching legislative debates on the hall monitors at this capitol and others across the South, and countless more watching archived footage on my desktop. But when I picked up a hand-me-down, first-generation iPad to watch this debate at home, it had the force of a revelation. The clarity of the live-streamed images on that device was so much better than what I was accustomed to, that when Rep. Don Parsons of Marietta began calling out by name the legislators who’d spoken against the measure, you could see that his hands were trembling, ever so slightly.

There has recently been a dust-up over in Alabama which might have set our ears to ringing here in Georgia, had our ears not already been deafened by the clamor from Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Residential and commercial customers in Alabama pay more for their electricity than those in Georgia, even though the price of the fuel needed to produce the electricity is less there than it is here. According to a recent survey, Alabama Power customers paid $1.5 billion more over a six-year period than they would have if they could have bought the electricity from Georgia Power, even though both companies are owned by Southern Co.

And even though vast reserves of natural gas have been discovered in Alabama while Georgia is still prospecting for its first big strike, customers of the two largest natural gas utilities there are charged two to three times more in operations and maintenance costs than customers in Georgia or Mississippi.

Stories about the Republican governors’ struggle with accepting the Medicaid expansion often say, as an Associated Press story did this week, that under the Affordable Care Act, “Washington pays the full cost of the expansion for the first three years, gradually phasing down to 90 percent.” This is true, but there is a little more to it, and in political terms that little is large.

To expand the explanation somewhat, from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2016, the feds will pay the participating states 100 percent of their Medicaid costs. The scale-down begins in 2017 and reaches 90 percent in 2020.

What results from this is somewhat akin to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. To some GOP governors who have been vocally opposed to Obamacare, the train they’re on appears to be moving slowly enough to get through one more qualifying, one more election, maybe even having their portrait hung in the capitol before they’re compelled to concede.

It’s only fitting the first annual Lovebug Award for Congressional Cooperation should go to the representative of a Gulf Coast district familiar with those pesky winged insects which show up a couple of times a year to sacrifice themselves on the windshields of automobiles.

Rep. Steven Palazzo of Biloxi was one of 67 Republicans who voted Friday against a $9.7 billion relief bill for the part of the country hit by Superstorm Sandy. He was joined by five members of the Georgia delegation – Paul Broun, Doug Collins, Tom Graves, Tom Price and Rob Woodall – as well as representatives from several other states which have been recent recipients of federal disaster aid. But the prize for sheer glass-house, pot-call-the kettle-black brass has to go to Palazzo, who represents the district where Hurricane Katrina hit land, in the heart of a region where rent-seeking isn’t a dusty economic term but a way of life.

It’s that time of year when we feel compelled to enumerate things. The annual tallies of the biggest stories and the best movies and books have grown into a jungle of lists – everything from the most annoying words (“Whatever” won for the second year in a row this year) to the biggest media stories (Rush Limbaugh’s tiff with Sandra Fluke took the top spot in a Politico Top Ten story).

Arguing with the selections is a big part of this New Year’s fun. (Why isn’t “proactive” ever singled out, and how could a Rush tantrum top Karl Rove’s election night performance?) We don’t really expect these year-end reckonings to bear up to historical scrutiny.

When the horror film “The Exorcist” came out in 1973, the Boston Phoenix interviewed several experts of different sorts on the film’s significance as a pop culture examination of the great struggle between good and evil. One of them was a drug councilor familiar with the worst ravages of inner-city street life, who thought the movie got it all wrong in portraying such a sharp conflict between the demon and its exorcist. In reality, he said, “Good and evil roll around together like puppies at play.”

It’s funny how a line will stick with you, long after the original subject fades into obscurity. That one comes back to me every time the concept of “pure evil” is invoked, as it was last week after the shooting. Not the two cops in Topeka who were shot Sunday night, or the mother whose boyfriend shot her in front of her children the Sunday before in Columbus, but the big shooting, the one everybody’s talking about.

Even before they quit their jobs last week, Jim DeMint and Chip Rogers had a lot in common.

Both DeMint, the South Carolina conservative who raised money to defeat some of his Republican U.S. Senate colleagues, and Rogers, the Georgia legislator who was a leader in the coup which made Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle a spectator in the state Senate for a couple of years, cultivated the reputation of right-wing firebrands, unafraid of roiling the clubby sensibilities of their respective august chambers.

Like a number of the politicians who have positioned themselves on the Republican Party’s right-most post, both DeMint and Rogers came to politics from a background in the media, with just a wink at showbiz.

Terminology matters immensely in the framing of a political debate, but sometimes it falls a little short.

The American people were not convinced in the last election that every cutthroat CEO, coldhearted skinflint and profligate heir deserved to be called a “jobs creator.” Nor does it appear, as plasmas move briskly out of box stores and power-intensive holiday decorations brighten the landscape, that they believe they are headed for a “fiscal cliff.”

To understand what it took for U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss to renounce the Grover Norquist no-tax pledge last week, let us revisit a happier day for Republicans, the 2001 presidential inauguration of George W. Bush.

By the luck of the media seat lottery, I was on the first row facing the Capitol steps. The two Clinton inaugurations had been noisy, Jacksonian affairs, but it was bitter cold when Bush took office and when he began to speak, about the need to restore civility to public life, to reform the schools and refit Medicare and Medicaid for the long term, the response from the Republican throng was the muted thud of heavily-gloved hands.