Profiles in Spinelessness



Friday’s editorials lament the lack of courage in the legislature to implement the tax reform the state desperately needs and wish the CCU football team well as they start the playoffs.

As shoppers eager for bargains line up at cash registers today, don’t be surprised to see a few holding guns.

Today and Saturday the state holds its third annual Second Amendment tax holiday, a boondoggle waiving the sales tax on handguns, rifles and shotguns. Putting aside the question of whether the state needs to be encouraging gun sales, the tax break is indicative of a system riddled with loopholes and baffling choices. Twine used in packaging a farm’s tomatoes is tax exempt, for instance, while twine for used in curing tobacco is not.

We had hoped that the legislature’s Tax Realignment Commission would help resolve some of these inconsistencies, but the panel was hobbled from the beginning. First the panel was barred from considering a change to the widely despised Act 388, which includes a point-of-sale reassessment for taxes on certain real estate, and then the legislature opted not to vote on the commission’s eventual recommendations as a package, instead choosing to vote on them one by one, a decision that presages a continuation of the piecemeal approach to taxation currently in place.

Now the entire overhaul looks to be dead on arrival, with no legislators eager to close sales tax loopholes and leave themselves open to accusations of “raising” taxes in a struggling economy.

“I just don’t see anyone in the legislature that is going to put up this report as a bill, not in this political climate,” Dan Cooper, the chairman of the House’s Ways and Means committee, told the Statehouse Report earlier this month.

With courage failing in the legislature, it makes us wonder: Why appoint the commission at all if its recommendations will simply be ignored? It’s time we remind our leaders we elect them to make hard decisions, not only popular ones.

 

 

 

From 1-4 to Playoffs

 

Not so many weeks ago, the Coastal Carolina University football team was an unlikely postseason contender. Then, the Chanticleers were 1-4 on the season. On Saturday, after finishing the regular season 6-5, they are in the first round of the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision playoffs. CCU and Western Illinois University play at 1 p.m. at Brooks Stadium in Conway.

Congratulations to the players, head coach David Bennett and his staff, and of course the fans, for a terrific finish of four straight wins – and a boost from Liberty, which beat Stony Brook last week while CCU was pounding Charleston Southern 70-3. Those wins gave CCU a share of the Big South championship, and the tiebreaker gave the Chants the conference automatic playoff bid. (The bid went to the team allowing the fewest points in conference play.) The Chants also won the home field advantage in the expanded FCS playoffs, which have 20 teams in the first round. CCU had at-large berth in 2006.

For a team that was 1-4, then 2-5, this is quite an accomplishment. Like the desert bird of Egyptian mythology, the beautiful phoenix, the Chants have risen from the ashes of the first seven games to new life in the postseason.

The Leathernecks play football in the Missouri Valley Conference and are 7-4 going into Saturday’s game. WIU is in Macomb, Ill., one of the state’s regional universities. It was once one of the Illinois normal universities, two-year teachers’ colleges.

 

We had hoped that the legislature’s Tax Realignment Commission would help resolve some of these inconsistencies, but the panel was hobbled from the beginning. First the panel was barred from considering a change to the widely despised Act 388, which includes a point-of-sale reassessment for taxes on certain real estate, and then the legislature opted not to vote on the commission’s eventual recommendations as a package, instead choosing to vote on them one by one, a decision that presages a continuation of the piecemeal approach to taxation currently in place.

Now the entire overhaul looks to be dead on arrival, with no legislators eager to close sales tax loopholes and leave themselves open to accusations of “raising” taxes in a struggling economy.

“I just don’t see anyone in the legislature that is going to put up this report as a bill, not in this political climate,” Dan Cooper, the chairman of the House’s Ways and Means committee, told the Statehouse Report earlier this month.

With courage failing in the legislature, it makes us wonder: Why appoint the commission at all if its recommendations will simply be ignored? It’s time we remind our leaders we elect them to make hard decisions, not only popular ones.

 

 

 

From 1-4 to Playoffs

 

Not so many weeks ago, the Coastal Carolina University football team was an unlikely postseason contender. Then, the Chanticleers were 1-4 on the season. On Saturday, after finishing the regular season 6-5, they are in the first round of the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision playoffs. CCU and Western Illinois University play at 1 p.m. at Brooks Stadium in Conway.

Congratulations to the players, head coach David Bennett and his staff, and of course the fans, for a terrific finish of four straight wins – and a boost from Liberty, which beat Stony Brook last week while CCU was pounding Charleston Southern 70-3. Those wins gave CCU a share of the Big South championship, and the tiebreaker gave the Chants the conference automatic playoff bid. (The bid went to the team allowing the fewest points in conference play.) The Chants also won the home field advantage in the expanded FCS playoffs, which have 20 teams in the first round. CCU had at-large berth in 2006.

For a team that was 1-4, then 2-5, this is quite an accomplishment. Like the desert bird of Egyptian mythology, the beautiful phoenix, the Chants have risen from the ashes of the first seven games to new life in the postseason.

The Leathernecks play football in the Missouri Valley Conference and are 7-4 going into Saturday’s game. WIU is in Macomb, Ill., one of the state’s regional universities. It was once one of the Illinois normal universities, two-year teachers’ colleges.