SURPRISE, SURPRISE-SENATOR ADELSTEIN WANTS TO TAX AND SPEND

By Ed Randazzo

In case you missed Sunday’s Rapid City Journal, David Montgomery wrote a front page article entitled “Budget expected to dominate upcoming legislative session.” In it he explains that Senator Adelstein wants to “to cancel proposed cuts to education and Medicaid and even increase state support for public schools,” by instituting a new tax.

More “business-as-usual” for Senator Adelstein’s solution to the on-going structural deficits in South Dakota. In his world you don’t treat the cause but the symptom…..you don’t cut the expenditures, you increase the revenue by taxation. The senator says we will raise $50 million dollars a year and that this idea is more popular than budget cuts.

Sweeten it how you will by selling it as a “temporary” measure that will be partially paid for by tourists (26% he says). Simple math tells me that $37 million dollars will be paid by South Dakotans in addition to your current tax liability. This $37 million, along with the $13 million paid by tourists, will go to enable the addiction of spending more than we have.

Our elected legislators must go to Pierre on January 11, 2011 to make the necessary spending cuts to balance the budget and eliminate the structural deficit. It will not be painless or popular but it is the right thing to do.