From the Indianapolis Business Journal:
As the first governor since the Civil War to win election with less than 50 percent of the vote, Mike Pence has a political capital problem. And it’s starting to show.
His goal of a 10-percent income tax cut has been met with a lukewarm reception from House and Senate leadership and is in jeopardy of being left out of the new budget.
The reticence of fellow Republicans to support the cut has at times seemed to mystify an administration whose only tangible policy goal is stalled and in danger of dying.
It must have been an exciting moment for the newly elected governor. Sent to the Statehouse after 12 years in Congress, the heir apparent to a legacy of pragmatism bequeathed by an enormously popular predecessor. A largesse built over eight years during which Daniels amassed a trove of political capital. And now it was Pence’s to spend.
Plenty of lottery winners (not the ones on the Hoosier Lotto billboards) could tell you what happens next.
Down the hall from his new office, Pence surely noted that both chambers of the General Assembly were filled with walkout-proof majorities of allies, like cheering fans filling the end zone, just waiting on him to walk across the goal line. Nowadays, they look more like defensive linemen.
Pence is betting his first year in the governor’s mansion on his only tangible policy goal of note, cutting the state income tax from a repressive 3.4 percent to 3.06.
Get excited. The average Hoosier would keep a meager $3 more per week, at a cost to the state of $750 million. Fiscal conservatism at its finest.
After capping property taxes—and in so doing creating a new third rail in Indiana politics—the state is now confronting what municipalities have grappled with for years, namely the inconvenient truism that fewer taxes means less revenue.
This prudent opposition has some unlikely heroes, too.
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See the full opinion here:
http://www.ibj.com/article?articleId=40413
