2 lawmakers renounce tax pledge — again This story is a little weird:
Rep. David Wolkins called on Americans for Tax Reform on Thursday to stop holding him “hostage” to a no-new-taxes pledge he no longer believes in.
Wolkins, a Winona Lake Republican, was joined during a Statehouse news conference by Rep. Win Moses, D-Fort Wayne, who also wants off the national anti-tax lobbying group’s list of state lawmakers who oppose all new taxes.
“This is an organization that’s out of control,” said Moses, who has written five letters asking to be removed since signing up in 1998.
Wolkins said he has previously renounced his pledge and campaigned on that, but Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based group founded by Republican political operative Grover Norquist, won’t remove his name from a list posted on its Web site.
David Ansell, the group’s chief of staff, accused Wolkins on Thursday of staging “a publicity stunt.”
“I don’t like being called dishonest by a dishonest politician,” he said. “He knows very well how to get out of the pledge, and he hasn’t done it.”
The group says Wolkins failed to have a representative present at the news conference when he declared the pledge void. No one from the group showed up Thursday.
Wolkins says that he can’t get the group to set him a date to have a person present. First of all, I agree with Wolkins and Moses. Taxes shouldn’t be a first option, but they should be a possibility. Government is necessary for some things. Those things cost money. If you need those things, then you need money, and that comes through taxes. The debate should be around whether this or that thing is necessary. Grover Norquist, et al. have it backward. They simply conclude that government isn’t going to pay for anything and foreclose the possibility of funding any other necessities. (The anti-tax crusaders have never been particularly helpful in identifying government programs that ought to be cut. They tend to leave that part of their equation vague.)
Second, the story has something of a “Movie of the Week” quality to it. Poor legislator haunted by his past. He tries to make good but a shadowy organization won’t let him out. For those who may not know, Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform is the Republican power broker who famously said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” and “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.”
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