Dumbfounded Democrats
Like millions of Americans, I spent a fair amount of time on the highways over the last week or two. Thus, I spent more time listening to the radio than usual and in between frequent repetitions of Disturbed's new single and System of a Down's BYOB, I caught an amusing snippet on Minnesota Public Radio, NPR's regional soviet.
It seems that the Minnesota Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, modified the state tax laws last year and reduced the value which individuals donating cars to charity can place on their vehicles and deduct from their state income taxes. Although the law has been in effect for only a short time, the 60 charities which run vehicle donation programs have already been hard hit, as the number of cars being donated has fallen from 25 to 50 percent, depending on the charity.
The gentleman speaking with the MPR reporter seemed resigned to the likelihood that many of these charities were likely to abandon their vehicle donation programs, as spending more money to raise awareness of programs bringing in markedly fewer cars simply wouldn't make sense for them.
This was amusing, because liberal dogma insists that the public always has a static response to modifications in tax law and asserts that individuals simply do not change their behavior in reaction to changes in their taxes even if those changes will affect their economic well-being. This is why the liberal-dominated legacy media is always taken by surprise when tax increases fail to bring in the expected amount of revenue, as their faith in static tax models inevitably outweighs their willingness to remember what happened the last 10 times that taxes were increased.
For example, two years ago, the St. Paul Pioneer Press ran a massive multi-day investigative reporting story on attempting to explain why the dot-com boom had missed Minnesota and why no new technology companies were growing up to replace old-school giants such as Honeywell, Medtronic and Control Data. A panoply of reasons were suggested, ranging from the weather to a failure to spend sufficient money on the University of Minnesota.
Not once did the writers see fit to mention the fact that Minnesota's state-local tax burden was 10.8 percent in 2003, almost a full percent higher than the national average. Nor did they note the 7.85 percent state income tax or that Naples, Fla., is known as Edina South to the many snowbirds who have made Florida their permanent domicile. In 1998, I was a member of a corporate board where nine of the 13 board members - all of whom had been Minnesota residents at one time - were making their homes in Florida. And that didn't include the guy who had moved to the Bahamas.
When I called the business editor and asked him why taxes had not been mentioned in the article, he said his reporters simply didn't believe people would move simply to avoid paying income taxes. He said he'd raised the subject with them, but it was pointed out that since Silicon Valley and the 101 Corridor in Massachusetts were both located in high-tax locales, taxes couldn't possibly be an issue.
Apparently no one stopped to consider the fact that while it's probable that the presence of Caltech, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology might outweigh the tax issue, none of these elite entrepreneur-producing universities happen to be located in Minnesota. On the other hand, it is really freaking cold in the wintertime, so at least the state has that going for it.
Another mystery befuddling believers in paradise by politicians is the methamphetamine explosion. Why, one might ask, are drug users today so interested in smoking home-cooked battery acid that will rot their teeth faster than hot sauce from Taco Bell soaked in Pepsi when previous generations of druggies were content with natural opium and coca derivatives?
The answer, of course, lies in the application of the dynamic reaction, in this case to the federal government's War on Drugs. You may not be able to buy a tin of Guatemalan Snoose at Walgreen's these days, but no one's going to ask any questions about what you're doing with a jug of antifreeze in the trunk of your car.
While the Law of Unintended Consequences eventually bites everyone in the backside from time to time, one has to be either foolishly stubborn, brain-damaged or a liberal Democrat to repeatedly find oneself victimized by it.