KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CAN DEMOCRATS DELIVER STATE TAX CUT?

With a scant four weeks to go in this year's legislative session, so little has been accomplished that no veteran observer I've asked can remember a slower or more unproductive year. Now, it's important to note that this isn't all bad. Missourians not only welcome fewer laws being passed, in most cases, but would also delight in a session that might be devoted solely to repeal of many of the noxious sections of the statute books. Absent an intervening election that would sweep out lots of dead wood, such a session is a fanciful prospect.

Still, what was the prospect just a few short months ago?

January was only a few days old when Gov. Mel Carnahan took to the podium in his state-of-the-state message to declare the need for an election-year tax cut. The Carnahan proposal was to slash the state sales tax by a quarter-cent. House Republicans saw his tax cut and raised him big. The GOP leadership proposed to eliminate entirely the sales tax on food, placing Missourians in the same position as Iowans, among others, who have no such tax. Way back in January, the action was swift. Bills were introduced, the relevant House and Senate committees got right to work, hearings were held, committee amendments offered and then -- nothing.

The Senate tax cut bill got bogged down in committee, and little has been heard of it since. Loaded up with amendments that would enact further tax cuts, including tax deductions for parents with children in private and parochial schools, grades 9-12, it met up with an appropriations committee chairman who didn't want any permanent tax cut, but rather a temporary one only. Democratic Senate leaders later yanked the governor's transformed tax bill off the priority list, and it languishes. Which leads us to the House.

In that chamber, the committee's Democratic majority took the Carnahan proposal and transformed it into a sales tax cut -- not of a quarter cent -- but of 1.75 percent. GOP members offered their proposals, including the elimination of the food tax, along with tax relief for retirees and others. The Democratic committee chairman pulled the bill, saying too much had been added and too much more would be in floor consideration by the full body. Little has been heard of it since.

All this maneuvering takes place with the backdrop of mandated tax refunds owing to Missouri income taxpayers, payable next year. These are the first-ever Hancock Amendment refunds that are owed because Missouri tax receipts outstripped the growth in personal income for the first time since voters added this section to the constitution back in 1980. Thus, Mel Carnahan's huge tax increases accomplished something that none of Missouri's frugal governors have been able to do in 16 years -- to grow government so fast that he, and his action alone, triggered the Hancock refunds.

It's interesting. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Empire is a fading memory, its Politburo on the ash heap of history. But Fidel Castro rules in Havana, the Stalinists still control North Korea and Democrats prevail on the third floor of your state Capitol. No one under the age of 65 has ever voted for a Republican majority in either house of the General Assembly. Meanwhile, overtaxed, hardworking Missourians, who work from Jan. 1 until the month of May solely to pay their taxes, are watching and waiting to see whether the party that has dominated the General Assembly since before I was born can deliver on the tax cuts they promised with such fanfare just a few months ago.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.