The current “taxpayers’ protest” over the latest spike in property taxes, plus the decision by the City County Council last week to raise local income taxes, has aroused the public. Several columns and articles in Sunday’s Indianapolis Star provided examples of both the best, and worst, of people’s reactions to the current tax situation.

The Star gets credit for the most mature analysis of the root causes of the tax imbroglio. In an editorial entitled “There’s too much wrong to do anything but fix it”, it correctly predicts that the property tax reassessments ordered by Gov. Daniels are a band-aid on a bleeding wound and observes that the blame for the current tax mess lies squarely with certain politicians. However, those politicians’ last names are not Daniels or Peterson. They are more obscure politicians in the General Assembly with last names like Hinkle, Young (as in Michael), Bosma and Burton, each of whom not only voted against fire and township consolidation, but who even in the face of bipartisan support from the Mayor and the Governor, as well as from the local business community, killed off long overdue governmental reforms.

Even Editor Dennis Ryerson gets into the act in “We pay price for too much government”. Ryerson decries Indiana’s bewildering and often overlapping units of local government, from the staggering number of local assessors (1,100), to its antiquated forms of township and county governments. He opines that while this system may have served taxpayers well in the horse-and-buggy days, in today’s world of instantaneous communications Indiana’s system of local and county government is a paradigm of inefficiencies, waste and duplication. According to Ryerson, the problem isn’t government, it’s bad government and too much government. Anything that encourages the public to start paying as much attention to government and public affairs as it does to the Indianapolis Colts is a good thing, a point Matthew Tully makes in his column, “We resolve to keep an eye on government". In taking a reader to task for complaining that government never did anything for him, Ryerson observes that when run properly and efficiently, government is the institution best able to provide effectively for the common good.

The often misdirected anger over taxes is also fraught with danger. I shudder when I read that tax protestors recently shouted down at an anti-tax rally a conscientious an intelligent public servant like Rep.David Orentlicher (D-Indpls.). I cringe when I read that signs at Saturday’s Broad Ripple “tea party” blamed Gov. Daniels and Mayor Peterson for high property taxes, when neither of them has ever cast a single vote in a legislative body. I wince when I read that a citizen at that rally was quoted as complaining about “taxation without representation”. (The problem is not that we are without representation, it is that we have too much representation by too many mostly unaccountable politicians, most of whom escape accountability through gerrymandered districts.) And I tremble when I see theocratic demagogues like Eric Miller and anti-government politicians like Woody Burton attempting to harness this anger in support of their own personal agendas.

The public’s anger over unfair property tax increases is fully justified. But that anger should be constructively focused on finding lasting solutions to Indiana’s regressive and unfair system of taxation. We must never allow that anger to be exploited by demagogues for their own personal or political agendas.

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