From the Editor: Elections may tax our patience

If you didn’t get enough politics during the races for governor, Legislature and St. Mary Parish offices, you may be in for a post-holiday feast in 2020.
There’s talk about at least one, and maybe more, local governmental entities calling for elections in the spring. If they do, the purpose will be the one most likely to provoke energetic participation: new taxes.
The St. Mary Parish School Board has called a public meeting for 5 p.m. Dec. 12 to talk about the possibility of seeking a new half-cent sales tax.
We reported Wedn esday that, at a St. Mary Excel forum on development in Morgan City and Berwick, two key local officials made comments indicating that they don’t think new taxes will fly.
Morgan City Mayor Frank “Boo” Grizzaffi said the way to kill any progress locals have made toward boosting the economy is “to tax ourselves to death.”
And there was this from Parish President David Hanagriff: “Now is not the time to raise taxes in any way, shape or form.”
But Mr. President, how do you really feel?
After Tuesday’s Morgan City Council meeting, Grizzaffi just smiled and noted that he didn’t specifically talk about any government specifically. But he also mentioned that a half-cent sales tax would push the total sales tax for Morgan City purchases over 9%.
There’s a dilemma here for local governments. Or maybe it’s a trap for elected officials.
The parish economy is still struggling because of the shift in energy industry focus away from offshore. Talk about ways to improve the local business climate, and you’ll hear about infrastructure and education.
Schools, highways and bridges cost money. Better ones cost more money. But if the governments try to raise taxes to make improvements, they’re putting a bigger load on the people who have to put food on the table when times are bad.
At worst, higher taxes will chase away the potential employers who could make things better.
That’s a tough choice for elected leaders. But it’s not impossible. Gov. John Bel Edwards got reelected after pushing for increased sales tax revenue to break a cycle of billion-dollar-plus shortfalls at the start of every budget deliberation.
Even so, there’s a lot of anti-tax sentiment in the best of times. Some go so far as to say that all taxes are theft. They point to the Boston Tea Party, and say America is about cutting taxes. And isn’t that quite the convenient definition of patriotism?
You can argue that taxes have been the only real issue in Baton Rouge for at least two decades.
In the 1990s, Louisiana state sales taxes exempted groceries and medicine. But, pleading poverty, the Legislature voted every year to suspend the exemptions — that is, to tax your zucchini and pork steaks — in order to balance the budget.
Along came the Stelly Act, by which the people voted to make those exemptions permanent and to make up for the money by raising income taxes at the upper end of the wealth scale.
That lasted about as long as it took the well-off folks to file their state tax returns. The income tax hikes were repealed, leaving the Legislature to scramble for money again.
The exemptions are a big deal in tax theory. Reporting back in the 1970s, the heyday of anti-tax sentiment, I learned that experts generally consider sales taxes to be regressive. They put a disproportionate burden on low-income people, who are forced to spend a bigger share of their income on taxes levied against necessities than their more affluent neighbors.
The exemptions for food and drugs are the remedy for any inequities.
But the finer points of tax theory aren’t likely to be a big part of the debate if we have to decide whether to impose a new school sales tax. Instead, we’ll be talking about whether the central office administration is top-heavy, about the plight of people struggling to make ends meet, and about the sort of schools we want our children to attend.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.