Across the nation, voters are refusing to play enabler to their political leaders' spending addiction, and they are rejecting efforts to raise taxes, whether on the Internet or anywhere else. California voters threw Gov. Gray Davis out of office in part because he couldn't resist raising the car tax, and they replaced him with Schwarzenegger, who repealed the tax hike just after taking office and said he did not intend to raise any other taxes. Alabama voters rejected Republican Gov. Bob Riley's tax-hike referendum by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Seattle voters repudiated a tax on latte coffee by a similar margin.
Ohio's Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who served with me at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and on the National Tax Reform Commission, is rallying voters to force the Legislature to rescind the stealth 20 percent sales tax increase that Taft helped slip through the Legislature. If the Legislature refuses to repeal the sales tax hike, Blackwell intends to take the issue directly to the voters by gathering sufficient signatures to place repeal of the tax increase on the ballot on Nov. 2, 2004.
President Ronald Reagan characterized politicians' natural predisposition as: "If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it; and if it stops moving, subsidize it." The Reagan dictum still holds, it seems, even if "it" moves over the Internet in data packets at the speed of light. Today, politicians at virtually every level of government are looking for ways to tax the Internet.
American politicians of both political parties are addicted to spending. And like any other addict, they will go to extreme lengths to procure the money to support their habit. In seeking to enable this addiction, Alexander, Voinovich and their fellow GOP spending addicts are playing a very dangerous political game. By poaching on the Internet, the last tax-free zone in America, they risk raising the ire of voters just as the nation enters a presidential election year.
Even worse, they risk slowing the new economy. Shouldn't we have at least one tax-free zone in our lives where politicians can't roam free to prey on taxpayers at the expense of economic growth?