Story by Chris Graham

The conventional wisdom is that Emmett Hanger is facing not one, but two, challenges from the right because of his 2004 vote on a budget-reform package that resulted in an effective tax increase for Virginians.

So then one might expect to see Hanger, a Republican from Augusta County, making strenuous efforts to cover or otherwise explain away his ‘04 vote - not to mention the fact that he was one of the chief architects of the tax-reform plan from which the budget reform sprung fully formed.

Politics, of course, is nothing if not chock full of surprises.

“I’m actually still a proponent of tax reform - and am still working on a number of tax-reform issues,” says Hanger, who is being challenged for the Republican Party nomination in the 24th Senate District this spring by Buena Vista businessman Scott Sayre - and if he is able to prevail there will face off with Albemarle Libertarian Arin Sime in the November general election.

“It’s an evolving process - so it’s not something where you can have a bill or series of actions and say, Well, we did that, we’ll never have to do that again. Because it’s kind of an evolving thing - as circumstances change. But there’s still more work to be done, in my opinion, to bring equity to the system - and a part of it has to do with the fact that we’ve allowed our tax system to become regressive,” Hanger says.

Where Hanger came under fire three years ago was on the issue of what became budget reform - as it was styled by former Democratic governor Mark Warner. Critics said the word reform was nothing more than a cloak for the less politically palatable term tax increase - and point to the fact that the plan adopted by the General Assembly and signed by Warner led to a billion-dollar annual increase in the burden placed on Virginia taxpayers.

That this move was done in the context of what has become a decadelong pattern of growth in the state budget is not something that is easily lost on Hanger’s political rivals.

“There’s got to be a stop to this never-stopping increases in our taxes. We’ve got to put a halt to that and restore some sanity,” Sayre says.

“As a businessman, I know how to balance a budget. I know how to meet a payroll. And I think back to some of the issues that I’m looking at right now, especially the rising taxes, and I wondered, our state in the last 10 years increased its population only by 10 to 12 percent, and yet in the last 10 years we have doubled our state spending. You couldn’t run a business like that. You couldn’t run a family like that. You can’t run community programs like that. We’ve got to return some sanity to this process,” Sayre says.

“The people who think that the solution to all of our problems is higher taxes and more taxes, they’re just wrong,” Sayre says.

“I think we need to reframe the debate a little bit in Richmond right now,” Sime says. “When you look at taxes, and you look at our state budget, our state budget has grown 118 percent in the last eight years. That’s a large increase in the budget - it’s over double in the past decade.

“We shouldn’t have to be raising taxes, or even discussing it, in my opinion, in order to meet core needs like transportation,” Sime says. “We had the big tax increase that Emmett voted for already - and we had a very big surplus after that. I don’t think that we need to be revisiting the issue of more taxes and talking about where is transportation money going to come from. They’ve got a lot of money in Richmond already. Maybe they need to allocate a little more intelligently. Maybe they need to allocate first to the core needs like transportation, and then look at everything else next.

“The problem with this debate in general is that nobody is taking a step back and looking at this,” Sime says. “That’s what you would do with your personal budget. When you realize that you’re coming up short every month, and you’ve either got to put more on your credit card, or go get a raise somewhere - well, neither one of those options is a good way to go. Sometimes the first thing you do is you say, Do I need to be paying for 200 extra channels on the cable TV or not? Maybe I don’t. Maybe I can live with a hundred. And you sort of look at things that way first.

“We don’t have any of that attitude in Richmond at all,” Sime says.

Hanger responds that the solution to the transportation issue, to cite one example, is not at all as simple as “saying that there is plenty of money there, and it’s just a matter of producing greater efficiencies.”

“I think we all need to recognize as part of the debate that we are working on efficiencies - but the problem is that we have not made adjustments, and we’re not in a position to do anything substantive until we have additional revenue to do it with,” Hanger says.

“I’m hopeful that we can get an extended debate on transportation - because we had initially put a proposal on the table for transportation funding as well, and that was taken off the table, and it was said that we would come back to it later. But even with all the talk about this, we really have not been able to have as meaningful a discussion on transportation funding as we should have or could have,” Hanger says.

Filed under: 7-April 2007 Issue