editorials

Taxes are as certain as death, the adage teaches, and in some quarters, their reputation is just as bad.

Witness the willingness of presidential candidacy-explorer Michele Bachmann in New Hampshire last weekend to draw a parallel between the prospect of tax increases and the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust.

Higher taxes are "morally reprehensible," said the Minnesota Sixth District Republican congresswoman.

Those who share Bachmann's sense of moral proportion might fault as too mild the state constitutional amendment introduced last week by state Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, and 30 other Republican House members.

It asks the 2012 general election voters to increase the legislative majority required to raise state income, sales or property taxes from the current 50 percent plus one to 60 percent, a supermajority.

Around the country, some anti-tax conservatives are touting this idea as a modest adjustment to state constitutions, compared with other popular possibilities for re-rigging government to resist tax increases.

But there's nothing modest -- or democratic -- in granting a 40-percent minority the opportunity to impede the state Legislature from performing its constitutional duty to balance the biennial budget.

That would be the practical impact of the amendment Drazkowski is proposing. It would impose minority rule to an extent never before seen at the statehouse.

That possibility ought to give pause to legislators of both parties who take seriously their sworn obligation to balance the state budget.

The tax supermajority amendment is one of three proposed adjustments to the constitutional rules for legislative budget-setting that have popped up with the daffodils outside the Capitol this season.

The other two pertain to spending. One, first touted by Minnesota's other GOP presidential hopeful, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, would limit spending in one biennium to the amount of revenue the state collects in the previous biennium, with a narrowly limited exception for emergencies.

That amendment would have the effect of delaying state government's recovery from recessions and ratcheting down spending growth over time. It also would likely redirect spending on new priorities from the general fund to separate, hard-to-manage special-purpose accounts, likely financed with dedicated taxes.

The upshot: less transparency and less capacity for the Legislature to do its job -- that is, to judge competing demands for public resources and allocate funds accordingly.

The other proposal, unveiled Tuesday and sponsored by Senate taxes chair Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, attempts to use the Constitution to force legislators to do what prudence alone ought to dictate -- create a reserve fund.

It would require that the Legislature set in reserve 2 percent of forecasted revenues, and also set aside unspent fund balances at a biennium's end. A three-fifths supermajority vote of the Legislature would be required to spend the reserve.

Of the three proposals, the reserve amendment is least likely to produce pernicious unintended consequences. But it shares the principal defect of the other two: It would limit future legislators' flexibility to respond to the state's needs as they arise.

Longtime legislators in particular ought to be wary of yielding their institution's prerogatives to rigid constitutional formulas.

They should see how unexpected events (say a bridge collapse), new information (for instance, research about early childhood brain development) and changing circumstances (for example, an aging population) can alter decision-making in St. Paul.

They should know that writing today's political thinking about taxes and spending into the state's permanent charter risks tethering state policy to the past, just when it needs to move forward.