By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JAN. 14, 2020 | The only constitutional requirement that the Georgia Legislature must fulfill each year is to pass a state budget.
And as such, this usually amounts to quite a fight, as the duly-elected legislators move to help their friends, or hurt their enemies.
Oh! If they would only do adopt a budget! But no. These legislators don’t just tamper with the budget. Every self-important committee chair (and there are many, many legislative committees) seek to offer us plain folk “protection” from all sort of self-imagined problems that many of us do not realize exist, if they exist at all. The legislators want to save us from many problems that only they can foresee.
And so here they are off to all sorts of manipulations. They busily button-hole first one fellow legislator after another, seeking to get support for their own petty bills. Many a promise is made to support trivial bills of other legislators, so that they can get their petty bills passed.
And what are these petty bills? You can be sure that in passing any particular legislation, someone or some entity is going to gain some advantage. And someone, maybe the balance of us out in the non-legislative world, will perhaps be gored in the process.
What we need is an inventory of how many pieces of legislation are already on the books which gives some tax advantage to particular entities. Perhaps such an inventory would have enough impact on voters to instill consternation in them, and throw out these unfair bills, and maybe toss out the bill-writers, too.
There are many “sweetheart” bills passed that benefit certain individuals, and these are too numerous to mention. But we’ll give you one as an example: shrimpers in Georgia are exempted from paying taxes on fuel for their boats. Remember Georgia has the largest shrimping fleet on the East Coast.
That exemption is unfair to taxpayers and other companies. We suspect Georgia shrimp consumers would not mind paying a few cents more per pound for shrimp if this exemption, and similar exemptions for other industries, was eliminated. What all this would amount to would be a far-fairer tax system, where the pet companies of legislators would not be given a tax advantage.
Remember that the Legislature must meet for 40 days every year with its principal assignment to pass a budget? For sure, the wrangling over the budget is the key focus each year, and always causes not merely a stir, but a big fight. In the meantime, the legislators advance many other pieces of legislation that most of us would they rather not do, and usually only amounts to satisfy mainly some of their constituents.
One of the items that GwinnettForum has on its List of Continuing Objectives is for the Legislature not to meet as they do now, every year, but that the Legislature should meet every two years.
Why? Simply to protect us citizens from often-unneeded legislation, and at the same time, eliminate the budget fights by one half, since they would come only every other year. That would make less time for the Legislature to be creating more mischief.
How about this? Texas and a few other states have Legislatures that meet every other year. We look forward to the time when Georgia will adopt an every-other-year Legislature.
Pass the budget? Yes. But stop meeting so much. Pass legislation so that the Legislature meets every other year! That’s worthy legislation!
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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