February 27, 2005

Tennessee Tax Revolt Retold

I have finished reading Phil Valentine's new book, Tax Revolt : The Rebellion Against an Overbearing, Bloated, Arrogant, and Abusive Government, coming out March 8 from Nelson Current, and it is an excellent book. The book tells the history of the Tennessee Revolt that defeated repeated attempts to pass a state income tax a few years ago. It also provides numerous examples of biased and sloppy reporting on behalf of the Tennessee capital hill press corps - print and broadcast, from one TV reporter's false description of horn-honking tax protestors as a "Lexus Brigade" (most were folks of average income and non-luxury, even beat-up cars) to the slanderously false description of one protest as a "riot" (it wasn't - I was there), and - more importantly - the news media's unquestioning trust in and almost complete failure to dig into the budget numbers that they were being handed by the governor's office as it claimed Tennessee faced huge deficits (it didn't) and declining sales tax revenue (sales tax revenue was rising) and there was no fat or waste in the budget (there was).

Valentine, a partisan in the tax revolt, has written a book that provides a view of history that only an insider would know. As a fellow participant in those history-making days, I assure you he got it right.

And it is a story for the ages for the Tennessee Tax Revolt is a story as old as America herself, a story of ordinary citizens rising up against difficult odds to reclaim their government from elites who sought to use it to run roughshod over them - a story whose roots run back through time to the Boston Tea Party, the tax revolt that launched a nation.