COLUMBUS: John Adams, the sophomore Republican state representative from Shelby County in northwestern Ohio, wants to wean the state from the income tax.
This past week Adams responded to a Columbus Dispatch columnist who dared to question the representative's ideas.
Adams said ''opponents and even some editorial columnists will attempt to mischaracterize my bill because they know propaganda is a successful tool, but legislative discussions should consist of substance, not political theater or shock value.''
At the same time he sent the letter to the Dispatch columnist, Adams was kind enough to forward a copy to me and other reporters for Ohio newspapers.
It is not my intention to mischaracterize Adams' legislation, and I agree with him that the public discourse on whether the state should eliminate the income tax should be based on facts and not ideas pulled out of thin air.
So I felt it was my responsibility to ask Adams about some of the assertions he made in his letter, but unfortunately he has yet to answer my questions.
For example, Adams tells us that ''since the 1970s, Ohio's tax burden has exploded, going from sixth lowest to the seventh highest, losing hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of jobs.''
He notes that in the past six years, total state spending increased an average 2.4 percent while the General Revenue Fund averaged 4.5 percent growth.
''My plan cuts these two rates of spending growth in half and devotes the difference to phasing out the punitive and economically damaging income tax,'' Adams writes.
I asked Adams to explain the numbers he cites, what they mean in terms of real dollars and to outline what programs he would cut to reduce those two spending growth rates in half.
Silence.
The Legislative Service Commission, an independent, nonpartisan research arm for Republican and Democratic lawmakers, is responsible for putting pencil to paper and figuring out the financial impact of bills.
Ohio would lose $814 million in the first year of a 10-year phasing out of the income tax and $12 billion by 2020.
Great news if you don't want to dish out for income taxes, but how does the state pay for necessary governmental services, including passing along a large chunk of those dollars to county, city and township governments?
Five years ago — two years before Adams was elected to the Ohio House — his party and Gov. Bob Taft overhauled Ohio's tax system to, in their view, spur economic growth.
They began the elimination of the corporate franchise tax, the tangible personal property tax and a phased-in 21 percent income tax break across the board so that everyone, rich, poor and in-between, would pay less.
There has been no economic boom, but the combination of the overhaul and recession meant the annual state tax collections for the General Revenue Fund dropped $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2009, which ended June 30.
So I don't know whether Adams, as he enters his 38th month on the job, knows that there is a difference between looking back at six years in the growth of all state fund spending and General Revenue Fund allocations, and examining the state's books in the aftermath of the Republican tax overhaul.
Representative, let me save you the trouble: There is a huge difference and using six years as your starting point distorts the growth picture and doesn't factor in the reductions due to the tax overhaul.
Another question posed to Adams was to project his reductions out across a number of years, because I am interested in understanding the exponential impact of reducing the rate of growth by 50 percent, but alas, I still have no answer.
Adams uses his letter to talk about other states where there are no income taxes and lower sales tax rates than Ohio and he even cites five ''tax-haven'' states that are among the ''10 most prosperous economies in the nation over the past decade.''
Call me old school, but I was taught in journalism school that when your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.
So I asked Adams to list the tax-haven states and the basis for his assertion, because his letter makes it sound like the magic bullet for a prosperous economy is to reduce taxes on businesses and individuals.
State economies are complex, not simplistic, and there are a number of variables that go into whether a state experiences growth in population, jobs, businesses, etc.
A good 15 years before Adams decided to run for state representative, state lawmakers and then Gov. George Voinovich passed the Jobs I, and then a few years later, the Jobs II bills that created a number of programs at the state and local level to provide tax incentives to businesses to create and retain jobs.
No one at the state level has ever conducted a comprehensive study of whether these incentives work or not, but Ohio's economy has been sluggish since the turn of the millennium and the state had never fully recovered from the last recession before the latest one hit.
Maybe Jobs I and Jobs II allowed Ohio to tread water and prevented the state from sinking even further economically, but then again, perhaps someone like Adams needs to ask the tougher question: Where is the proof that giving businesses tax breaks spurs economic development?
Wouldn't the substantial legislative discussion that Adams pines for include answering this question?
Speaking of queries, Adams said in his letter that Alaska and New Hampshire pay for schools and roads without a general income tax or a sales tax, and I asked him how?
No response.
According to the Tax Foundation, New Hampshire has one of the highest local property tax rates in the nation. Is Adams suggesting we reduce the income tax and raise property taxes to be like New Hampshire? Should we raise the sales tax, which most analysts believe is regressive and devours a larger percentage of lower-income workers? I don't know.
Adams asserts that Ohio's flourishing manufacturing industry has ''packed up and relocated because our tax burden is too high.''
So I had to ask: Where is the proof that the tax burden is the reason Ohio has lost its manufacturing base?
During the time I was not hearing back from Adams, I decided to do a little research, to see if my mother truly loves me.
Adams is from Sidney, but he was born in Celina, the seat of Mercer County.
Celina is where Huffy used to employ 1,000 workers to make bicycles.
Huffy did not pack up and leave Ohio because the tax burden was too high.
According to USA Today, Huffy first moved to Missouri so it could pay its workers on average $8 an hour, which was $2.50 less per hour then it was paying in Adams' original hometown.
Eventually $8 an hour was too expensive, so Huffy packed up and left Missouri to move its operations to China, where 800 workers were being paid 25 to 41 cents an hour, but they were afforded free housing.
Moving to China allowed Huffy to sell the bikes at half their former price and the company's chief executive, Don Graber, received a bonus of $673,000 that exceeded his base salary of $554,000 for his stewardship of the company.
For the average 40-hour-a-week job, that's $590 an hour, but we know company executives work longer than eight hours a day.
Even if Graber never slept and worked 24 hours a day for 365 days, he was still paid $140 an hour, or 341 times more per hour than the Chinese employee making 41 cents.
Now waiting for Adams to respond, I learned he owns a furniture store in Celina and when I get the chance, I would like to ask him how sales are. I hope they are good, because it is tough to sell furniture to people who don't have jobs.
And Graber, even if he still shopped in Celina, probably doesn't need to furnish 1,000 living rooms.
One thing I will not need to talk about with Adams, because we are in agreement, is our mutual aversion to propaganda, and our belief that ''legislative discussions should consist of substance, not political theater or shock value.''
Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.
