Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Some scams are very good, and others are simply terrific. As few of us have ever gone to crime school, in either a prison or a police academy, we may wonder what makes a scam terrific, instead of just good. And here's the answer.

The terrific scam is the one where the mark, or victim, never even realizes he's been had. What's so great about it is that the mark will never even think of complaining, which means the scammer will never be prosecuted and can repeat the scam at will, often with the same marks.

The longer it takes the mark to realize he has been scammed, the better the scam.

We, in Fayette County, were exposed to special elections to increase our local sales tax for so-called school SPLOSTs in March 1998 and September 1999. The fact these were special elections, with an expected low turnout and many precincts located in schools, suggests these elections were set up under conditions favoring a Yes vote. We now know, of course, that a No vote resulted, and that a straight-forward vote in November 2000 produced a Yes vote for school bonds instead.

At the time of the SPLOST elections their promoters claimed that so-called visitors, including perhaps Irish Travelers, paid a large portion of our current 1-percent local sales tax. We were told we should take advantage of them. Classic scamming often includes an appeal to the mark's greed.

It's obviously taken me a few years, but it has finally dawned on me why some of our citizens, right here in Fayette County, might actually have been quite sincere in thinking that as much as 30 percent of our local sales tax comes from other people. The stark naked truth is that, for the Fayette citizens who live in our cities, much of the local sales tax does indeed come from other people.

Let's use nice round figures to illustrate how the system works.

The Georgia Department of Revenue collects $16 million a year in local sales tax in Fayette County. It then mails $8 million of it to the city governments of Fayette County, and it mails the other $8 million to the county government. The county government then gives its $8 million (in one form or another) to all its citizens. The net result is that the 50 percent of our citizens who live in the cities receive $12 million, and the 50 percent who live in the unincorporated area receive $4 million.

Let's look at this on a smaller scale. We have roughly 100,000 people in the county. Thus the local sales tax yields about $160 per person per year, on average. With an average of three persons per household, that's $480 for a household. We know from the 2000 census that the median household income is over $72,000 in our county. Thus it would make at least rough sense for $48,000 of it to be spent on taxable items, especially since food is subject to the local sales tax.

If the average household paid $480 in local sales tax and received $480 in property tax rebates, everything would be fine. But that's not the way it works.

Two households side by side, with one in a city and the other just over the line in the unincorporated area, will together contribute $960 in local sales tax. Come October, the city homeowner's property tax bill will show him receiving $480 as a city property tax rebate, and an additional $240 as a county property tax rebate, for a total of $720.

The unincorporated area homeowner will simply see the $240 from the county, because that's all he gets. (Actually, both of them might be short 25 percent of that, for the portion that goes to businesses, most of which pay little sales tax to start with. That's a separate scam.)

Is it any wonder, then, that the city folks think "visitors" are paying a lot of our local sales tax? It is, in fact, their neighbors in the unincorporated part of the county who provide their windfall. That might explain why the most active proponents of the SPLOST vote in September 1999 were city residents.

Not realizing that they have been the beneficiaries of what can most charitably be described as a legislative scam, our city residents think the local sales tax goose really lays golden eggs and ought to continue doing it. Not realizing that they have been the victims of the same legislative scam, our county residents seem largely apathetic and ready to be fleeced for another 10 years. That's the duration of the next tax-splitting "deal" our county commissioners are now hammering out with the cities, in virtual secrecy.

It's taken me years to discover why a sane person would think aliens from the planet Mars would come visit us here in Fayette County and help pay our local sales tax. Those Martians, it turns out, are our own neighbors in the unincorporated area of the county.

Now that we all know who the Martians are, it might not be a bad idea to drive a stake in the heart of our local option sales tax. It may take courage to do it, but our political leaders should realize that the scam has been exposed. We've all been unwitting victims, but that's no reason to continue this shameful scam for another 10 years. Those city residents with "pride of integrity" should join in the chorus to reform the system drastically or abolish the local option sales tax altogether.

Why look with scorn at the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, when we can find this one in our own backyard? Like charity, reform begins at home.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County

cypaquin@msn.com