Wednesday, January 8, 2003

Addiction exacts a terrible toll. That's why we teach our children not to take up smoking, which is costly, filthy and unhealthy. That's also why we tell them not to use illegal drugs that can turn them into zombies. When alcohol is consumed, we urge moderation, for the same reasons. Many of us also worry that state-sponsored lotteries may foster gambling addiction in some vulnerable people.

Is there some other addiction I have left out, one perhaps so shameful that nobody wants to talk about it? Yes, I have, and its name is taxes.

What our Fayette County commissioners left in our Christmas stocking in 2002 was a 10-year extension of our local option sales tax (LOST). They couldn't shake off their addiction to this tax. Not only didn't they give it a thought, it seems nobody else in the county did. Yet this tax is estimated to produce, and thus exact from us, $225 million over the next 10 years. Given our population of nearly 100,000, that's $2,250 per man, woman and child. Not per household, but per person.

The government's money must come from somewhere. Most of us recognize that plucking it out of sales transactions is one way to get it. The problem with the so-called LOST tax is that it is taken from all the county residents equally, and then redistributed to them unequally by giving more to city residents than to unincorporated county residents. Fayette's "deal" is to give $3 to city residents for each $1 given to non-city residents.

The size of this tax, and the inequity of its distribution, should have made it a worthy subject of debate when we had our elections for county commissioners in August. The incumbents, who already feed at the public trough and thus are interested in keeping it full, wouldn't touch this issue with a 10-foot pole. The challengers wouldn't touch it either, as all three live in cities that happen to benefit from the inequity. Instead of tackling the issue of whether the 10-year burden of $225 million in sales tax could not be handled differently, one challenger sought to make a big issue of the $25,000 (or so) annual pay of the county commission chairman.

When a debate was organized among the county commission candidates last summer, the sponsors didn't bother with questions about the impending consideration of renewing our LOST for 10 years. The local press didn't bring it up. To its credit, the AJC brought up the matter on Dec. 2, alluding to the unfairness of the tax and showing there is no such tax in Cobb, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Rockdale and Cherokee counties. The elections had long been over by then.

As for ethics, protestations of high ethical standards notwithstanding, the mayor of Peachtree City displayed no misgivings about any inequity that might result from squeezing the most he could out of his fellow Fayette citizens who, unlike him, happen to live in the unincorporated part of the county.

Ethics didn't seem to trouble the county commission chairman much either, even when the county staff indicated that the cities' percentage of the take was way too high. Like all the commissioners except the ineffective VanLandingham, he lives in a city.

Ethics is the last thing that would have troubled one council member in Tyrone who wanted as much of the LOST pie as he could get.

Our LOST tax was scheduled to expire on Dec. 31. Like many, many taxes, it was extended. Those who like to beat up on Democrats should observe that it wasn't Democrats who extended it either.

So why was it done with so little fuss? Because addiction makes you do things without thinking. It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat. The first lesson here is to beware of taxes. You'll seldom vote for a tax that doesn't turn out to be permanent. Addiction is hard to shake off.

The ultimate lesson is, don't ever start!

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County

cypaquin@msn.com