Tag Archives: Legislature

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself (& end up looking foolish)

With tax day looming tomorrow, how about something that reminds us of how much we all loathe the IRS and the politics of taxation?  (Not you–IRS employee who reads this blog and could conceivably audit me.  I think you’re a fine, upstanding person, a great dancer, and have fabulous hair.  I’m talking about a completely different IRS person who would never be so cool as to be reading this.)

For awhile now, candidates for office who have wanted to demonstrate their commitment to not taxing us into oblivion have signed the ATR (Americans for Tax Reform) Tax Pledge, the gist of which is that the candidate promises to oppose any net increase in taxes, corporate or personal.  (I know, I know.  The horror!  Why, with a philosophy like that, one might leap to the conclusion that the candidate in question wasn’t in favor of driving away business and could even want to improve the economy.  What will those crazy fiscal conservatives come up with next?)

Well, in a move so disingenuous that I wouldn’t be surprised if their pants were actually on fire while they did this, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started running an attack ad against Charles Djou (a Republican running for Congress in Hawaii’s 1st District) based on his pledge.  Of course, they couldn’t claim that Djou was opposed to higher taxes.  (Well, they could, but this would tend to undermine their efforts to not get him elected.)  So instead they twisted his anti-tax pledge into a claim that he supported tax breaks for companies moving jobs overseas.  As FactCheck.org explains, this is a complete misrepresentation of the anti-tax pledge that can only be explained by political sneakiness or crack addiction.  (Ok, I added the part about sneakiness and crack.  But FactCheck really did take the DCCC to task for the blatant misrepresentation of Djou, which, in this time of high unemployment, amounts to little more than a smear tactic.)

So let that be a reminder of a few things:

Don’t be swayed by outrageous claims when it comes to where the candidates stand on important economic issues.  Tax issues are almost always more complicated than can be explained in a 30 second commercial.  And falling for tactics like the DCCC tried with Djou will just teach politicians that making pledges isn’t worth the fallout.

While we can all agree that the employees of the IRS are a lovely group of people who should each individually get to date Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, April 15th still stinks.

Transparency Shouldn’t Have “Annoyance” Exceptions

Hawaii Reporter currently has a good summary of the effort to pass a law that would allow the Hawaii Department of Health to ignore requests for the President’s birth certificate.  (As you can imagine, there have been quite a few requests, and the DOH claims that it has become a waste of staff resources.)

Well, cry me a river.

A word of explanation: I once worked in a government FOIA office–for the Army as it so happened.  This was not long after two extremely unpopular Army decisions–the adoption of the Ranger beret for all soldiers and the awarding of the “Army of One” contract.  To say that we were besieged by requests for information about both of these things was an understatement.  Let’s just say that a large section of America was not at all happy about it and made that very clear as they sought more information about the decision process.

And “vexatious” requesters?  Well, I challenge the DOH to beat some of the doozies I encountered.  Processing something so simple and straightforward as a request for information about the microchips implanted by the Army in everyone’s brains was an easy day.

But I do have a point here–it didn’t matter what we in the FOIA office thought about the legitimacy of the requests we got.  We processed them.  Because that is the right thing to do.  Because an open and transparent government needs to treat all requests with respect–not just the ones that don’t annoy us.  And when we had to deal with the same question over and over and over and over again (like the beret), we did the logical thing–we made everything as open and easily available as possible and then streamlined the response process so that it didn’t use up too many of our resources.  (Hint to the DOH–Copy machines.  Use them.)  Did we gripe in the lunch room?  Sure.  But we never would have dreamed that someone would ever try to create a legal exception to the principle of transparency just out of annoyance.

As to why this is all important to the Native Hawaiian project–well, it should be obvious.  This is not a good precedent to set–especially in a state government that has made a lot of promises about sunshine and openness, but hasn’t always followed through.  If the legislature can carve out one exception to transparency policy out of reasons that amount to little more than bureaucratic irritation, then there’s not much to stop them from deciding that there are plenty of other things that they don’t much care to share with the public.

Making transparency a pick-and-choose option in the hands of bureaucrats violates the principle of open government and sets us on a slippery slope.