Comment on this story

The candidate who runs fastest away from a state income tax wins

In last week’s Republican primary elections for the state house and senate, in races between generally conservative candidates, the one fiercest in his or her opposition to a state income tax won every time.

We can only assume that the voters of East Tennessee are wholesale against a state income tax, and that premise may well be accurate. Never mind that Knoxville voters rarely have a choice in the matter. Most of us couldn’t name a candidate for state representative or senate who endorses a state income tax, and few candidates would dare mumble a cordial greeting in the direction of that pariah. Each race is between candidates who try to trump each other in the immovable staunchness of their opposition to such a tax. And in each case last Thursday, the candidate most opposed to the income tax won. It’s the ticket to a political career in East Tennessee.

They say that opposition to a state income tax is a regional thing, but the North Carolina border is just 40 miles away. The conservative Tarheel State, which repeatedly elected Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate, has had an income tax in place for a couple of decades. It’s not even actively controversial, perhaps because it’s credited with supporting a public-school system regarded as superior to Tennessee’s and one of the best state universities in the Southeast.

In most of the United States, a state income tax is regarded to be the fairest way to pay for education, health care, park maintenance, and the other services a state provides. What’s so different about Tennessee?

It doesn’t matter that under an income tax—which by all proposals recently under consideration in Tennessee would involve a sharp reduction in sales tax—the average working and middle-class East Tennessean would pay less per year to the state than they do now. Why, we’re against it anyway.

Maybe we don’t believe those numbers. Or maybe, like good and loyal serfs, we’re happy to pay our daily fealty at the grocery store, secure in the certainty that our lords may grow ever wealthier without having to pay as big a share of the public funds as they would in other states. After all, we’re used to buying TVs and sofas on the installment plan, even when the salesman admits we’ll pay much more for the privilege of doing so, just because the individual payments seem less intimidating. We’re happy to vote to pay our taxes the same way, a few pennies or dollars every day at the market or the mall.

So we vote for the enemies of income tax. And Parkey Strader beat Diane Jablonski in a close race for the 14th-district house seat. And Jamie Hagood, representative and dyed-in-the-wool anti-taxer who has vowed never even to consider a state income tax, beat Stokes, who was merely opposed to an income tax, more than two to one, for the sixth-district senate seat. And previously popular moderate Senator Bill Clabough was overtaken by arch-conservative dark horse Raymond Finney in the contest for the 8th-district senate seat.

Even more surprising, though, is how few people seem to care. Though more people voted than usually do in elections that don’t involve presidents or governors or U.S. Senators, these choices were made by a very small minority of the electorate who bothered to vote.

All of Tennessee depends on state funding for K-12 education and health care, etc., but perhaps more than most metropolitan areas, Knoxville is economically and culturally dependent on state funding. The University of Tennessee is one of the Knoxville area’s biggest employers. The 25,000 students who attend are a major part of the metro area’s economy, its apartment rentals, its restaurant and bar sales, its clothing retailers. The metro area also includes several state-supported community colleges. When state funding suffers, Knoxville suffers.

Occasionally, voters and candidates make a valiant effort. The peculiarly gerrymandered 17th house district, which stretches from affluent West Knoxville and which surely comprises the highest percentage of UT students and faculty, also includes a big chunk of conservative, mostly rural Jefferson County.

Among Knox County voters in that district, the most conservative candidate, Frank Niceley, came in a weak third, with a final tally in the three digits. Former City Councilman Ed Shouse, a political moderate, earned almost twice as many votes as Niceley within Knox County; potentially progressive community leader Jim Bletner, who was not necessarily dead-set against a state income tax, came in a strong second. Together, they earned far more votes than Niceley across the district, but they also split the moderate-progressive vote. Meanwhile, more than half of the voters of Jefferson County went for local boy Frank Niceley. And though Niceley’s total was only about 35 percent of the total votes cast, it’s enough for the nomination—and, perhaps, the office. But in November, Niceley will face Democrat Hank Barnett, an assertive accounting professor at Walters State who may be a worthy contender even in what some may consider a rubber-stamp Republican district.

In the absence of even the option of an income tax, it will be interesting to learn how the winners of the house and senate seats propose to solve the state’s considerable financial problems—and also do good by the state-supported institutions in their home districts.

August 12, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 33 © 2004 Metro Pulse