NEVER, never, never give up. So said Winston Churchill.
Reformation of Oklahoma‘s complex and extensive tax credit system has begun. It will take the tenacity of a great leader to see this through.
“Let the battle begin,” state Rep. David Dank said last week after the final meeting of the Task Force on State Tax Credits and Economic Incentives that Dank chaired. He paraphrased the Churchill line of “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Many battles remain. The state won’t cede all tax credits, which combined are costing at least $500 million a year by some estimates. Most credits and exemptions come with constituencies who like them. Never, never, never think they will go away. They will fight to keep credits with all the toil and sweat they can muster. Perhaps some blood and tears as well.
Bring it on, Dank indicated. “Starting right now,” he said, “the only lobbyist that matters is the taxpayer.”
Of course, most of the state’s credits and exemptions benefit most taxpayers in some way. Dank, R-Oklahoma City, seems ready for a fight nevertheless. His detractors will claim that the big guns won’t be aimed at behemoths such as the Quality Jobs Program or the oil and gas drilling credits. Class warfare will thus join the battle, but this effort will likely affect the 1 percent and the 99 percent, for good or for ill.
So the end of the beginning has come. The task force wants to end the practice of transferring tax credits. It wants greater scrutiny of job incentives programs and improved transparency. These are laudable goals. But much work remains to be done. If this results in elimination of only easy targets, the task force — part of a continuum of debate on this contentious issue — will have produced little more than previous efforts.
This is no ordinary time. The state has been hurting for revenue. Raising taxes is difficult and the Republicans who control state government want to cut taxes, not raise them. An alternative is to raise revenue by eliminating credits.
Dank has little more than a month to prepare a battle plan for the legislative session that begins in February. “I plan personally on being noisy about it,” he said, affecting a Churchillian determination. One proposal is a moratorium on all credits, which would then be released from abeyance status, one by one, after thorough review.
The task force and its chairman deserve high praise for their work. Despite all the hours they’ve put in, this truly is only the beginning. To never, never, never give up will take all the resolve they can muster. But they’ve already done much to get a grasp on a complicated topic. Another Churchill quote comes to mind:
“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.”
