Writing about Hennepin County raising its property tax levy for 2010, Phil Krinkie, head of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, trotted out a favorite tax-fighter's trope on Monday:
Wouldn’t it be nice to run your family budget that way? Just tell your boss you need a raise because, “There are just too many unknowns out there.”
You can decide for yourself about Krinkie's equation of a tax for the Twins stadium with a tax to pay for medical services the governor no longer wants to fund. I just want to drive another stake in the heart of the state-budget-is-just-like-the-family-budget false equivalence.
I wrote about this argument last January. I'm sure we'll be hearing this a lot more when the legislature starts its session in the new year, and as cities and counties continue facing the deepening consequences of shrinking revenue and rising demand for social services.
Krinkie here asks you to think about how you are expected to solve your own problems without going back to your boss for more money — and then to apply that to government (the employee) going back to the boss (taxpayer) in the same way.
As a former boss, I can tell you, Krinkie's you can't "just tell your boss you need a raise because..." is correct. Although most business owners do care about their employees, they almost uniformly do not accept responsibility for their employees' financial problems.
But his comparison is muddled. Yes, the employee/breadwinner/taxpayer is the same person. But the relationships and obligations that come into play are not the same. Let's see if we can follow the shell game here.
In the Micro view, the Employee receives money for carrying out the Boss's directions and business priorities. The Boss enforces accountability through rewards (salary) and sanctions (withholding increases and firing). So far, this is similar to the Macro view, in which Taxpayers (the Boss) and Government (the Employee) have a similar relationship.
But there are important differences.
First, the Boss is a singular person, working on behalf of himself or a corporate entity that is also legally regarded as a person and operates according to a common set of goals, priorities, etc.
In the Macro view, Taxpayers comprise a highly pluralistic population. They share a community, but the Bosses/Taxpayers may not have the same goals, may not regard all operations of government as necessary or desirable, and do not receive all the same services and benefits. Nor do they exercise as much control over how much they pay their Employee/Government.
Remember though, in aggregate, the Taxpayers are the same group of people as the Society that benefits from the money they pay into government. In Micro, the Boss and the Employee's Family are in no way the same and have very different interests. Although they both value the Employee's productivity and well being, the products or services produced by the Employee's work activities are of marginal interest to the Family.
Second, the salary relationship between Employee and Boss is a poor analog for the fiscal relationship between Government and Taxpayer. An Employee charged with executing an underfunded plan doesn't come back to the Boss for more salary. The request is for sufficient resources to accomplish the task — computers, inventory, more sales force, marketing dollars, training, etc.
The Boss may still say, just get it done, but it is the Employee's obligation to raise the resource issue as well as to look for ways to work smarter and to cut expenses somewhere else.
This deconstruction is way too complicated for many people to absorb. Krinkie's (and Pawlenty's) metaphor sounds right, and it appeals to their self-interest.
So expect to keep hearing it...
