Rep. Eric Burlison produced the video above to help explain the taxpayer protection legislation that he sponsored. From the YouTube description:
I've been fighting to pass the Taxpayer Protection Act for the past two years because I believe that budgetary accountability is crucial to good governance. Government bureaucrats think they should be immune to economic recession, so they encourage politicians to increase government expenditures at all costs. Unfortunately, this pressure results in zero savings for the state government (even in years of robust economic growth), and during inevitable economic declines and accompanying short-falls in government revenue, the state has to drastically cut spending, or even worse, increase taxes. Neither of these options is a viable long-term solution, so I've offered a systemic approach; by amending our State constitution, the Taxpayer Protection Act ensures that excess revenue is saved in boom years so that the funds are available in years of recession.Republican Lt. Gov. candidate Brad Lager speaks at the 1:30 mark about how Missouri government spending has been allowed to grow off the books through tax credits. St. Louis Tea Party founder Bill Hennessy has recently written about how tax credits kill society:
Tax credits reward particular businesses or developers with tax dollars from the general population. They concentrate wealth in a few hands. Tax credits are the way politicians play the market with someone else’s money.Broadly speaking, tax credits burden the general welfare to advantage the particular welfare of favored constituencies. There are other instruments of government that do that like the 2009 stimulus bill, the 2008 bank bailout (TARP), and, on a local level, tax increment financing (TIF). The general welfare is also burden through zoning laws and other regulations that then advantage the particular welfare of certain property owners and land developers.
At the 3:10 mark in the video above, Brad Lager talks about how the taxpayer protection act will reign in expenditures like tax credits with spending caps.
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