"Politically toxic"

How so, exactly?

“I don’t think we can make a good decision about any of this until we address the elephant in the room,” Stokes said, referring to “Stelly” — a politically toxic moniker among many voters.

The tax design was devised by then-Lake Charles Rep. Vic Stelly and was approved in a statewide 2002 vote. Generally, it lowered sales taxes and paid for it by charging more on personal income taxes.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco rolled Stelly back a little. Gov. Bobby Jindal rolled it back a lot. Both decreased personal income tax collections.

While income tax collections went down, sales taxes stayed low, leaving state government with $800 million to $1 billion less, depending on who is doing the counting, to pay obligations, which also didn’t decline significantly.

As a state senator, Noble Ellington voted for a Stelly rollback. It was politically popular at the time and seemed the right thing to do. Now the administration’s legislative liaison, Ellington says that vote was a mistake.

Just to be clear here, when Ellington and Stokes say a thing is "politically toxic," what they mean is their backers and the powerful lobby groups who spend all day schmoozing with them are unhappy with it.  But when Stelly went before the actual voters in 2002, it passed by almost 30,000 votes. 



The Legislature is probably going into special session next month. There, they will have to find the revenue necessary to clean up the mess left in part by the mistake of rolling back Stelly. Let's hope they take up the task with a clearer idea of what is and is not "politically toxic" this time.

Vic Stelly is the Devil

Amazing that this one piece of moderately reasonable tax reform is remembered as the worst thing ever to happen to Louisiana. It's certainly an indicator of how nutty things have become in this state over the past decade but I think it's a mistake to describe the ascendance of right wing orthodoxy as a growth in "partisanship" as AP reporter Melinda Desaltte does here.

Meanwhile, as partisanship grew in Louisiana, the tax changes -- which had been led by Republicans and approved with overwhelming bipartisan legislative support -- became a flashpoint to determine who is a fiscal conservative, with anyone who supported the Stelly Plan deemed liberal.

"That's what's so funny. It was not a conservative versus liberal idea. It's not like it was a big liberal tax increase handled by Democrats. It was handled by Republicans," said Stelly.

Lawmakers in 2007 voted to reinstate itemized deductions eliminated under the Stelly Plan. A year later, lawmakers rolled back the income tax brackets to before the enactment of the Stelly Plan.

Stelly said he still believes the plan was a good one, and every so often he writes a letter to newspapers or calls a radio talk show to defend it.

"Would I change anything? I wouldn't change a period or a comma," he said.

Is this what happened? Did "partisanship" really grow in Louisiana between 2002 and 2008? Sure, in some sense, we can describe the new situation as more "partisan" if we understand that to mean more purely and radically Republican. Isn't it more accurate, though, to write in an article like this that the balance of power shifted significantly toward a more conservative Republican politics? Why can't Deslatte just do that? Writing "as partisanship grew" disguises the true nature of the situation by suggesting the existence of a counterbalancing power concentration on the radical left in Louisiana which is simply ludicrous to even ponder.

For some reason, though, if a moderate position suddenly becomes "too liberal" for the political palate, it can't be because the center has ratcheted rightward. It has to be the result of too much "partisanship" the inference being that "both sides" have failed once again to "get past the polarization and get something done" as Clancy Dubos recently chirped. There must be some style guide to conventional bullshit journalism that demands this be so.