WMTA Shares these commentaries, without taking a position unless otherwise noted, to bring information to our readers To view the archives of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii's commentary click here. Weekly Commentary For the Week of June 11, 2017 Reaching Back into the Past, Part 3 By Tom Yamachika, President On May 22, 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States denied review in seven cases involving retroactive tax legislation. In the Dot Foods case out of Washington which we have written about before, a company began business in Washington relying on a certain tax exemption, and asked the Department of Revenue to rule that the exemption applied. The DOR issued the ruling. A few years later, the DOR changed its mind, revoking the ruling and assessing the taxpayer. The taxpayer won its case in the court system, but the DOR came crying to the legislature and persuaded them to change the law retroactively for 27 years (!!) to prevent the massive and debilitating loss of revenue that it said would otherwise result. The other six cases originated in Michigan, where the legislature went back 6-1/2 years to change legislation regarding the division of income from multistate taxpayers among the states. The Michigan decision prompting the cases is named Gillette Commercial Operations North America v. Department of Treasury. A denial of review doesn't mean that the Court is approving the lower court decisions. The Supreme Court may just be saying, “your case is too boring” or “we're too busy.” “The Supreme Court is asked to consider 8,000 cases each year and chooses to hear between 70 and 80, so the odds are always tough. It doesn’t help that they seem to hate tax cases,” said Joseph Henchman of the national Tax Foundation. “As much as I wish retroactive tax laws went away, the states will be back,” he said. “I think Americans know these laws are unfair and wrong, and Tax Foundation is going to launch a new project to bring greater awareness to retroactive tax laws.” “Once again, the Court has shown no interest in this affront on the ‘rule of law’ and separation of powers,” said University of Connecticut Law School professor Richard Pomp. “[The] cases cried out to be heard. The denial of [review] dashes any hope in the short term that reliance interests of taxpayers will be respected and protected.” Pomp said that one famous legal scholar “went so far as to call a retroactive statute a ‘monstrosity,’ finding it a misuse of language even to apply the word ‘law’ to retroactive statutes.” There are cases when a retroactive fix to legislation may be justifiable. We also wrote about a retroactive fix to a 2011 amendment in our General Excise Tax Law, where the amendment took out two words that looked insignificant and were anything but. It seemed that the Department of Taxation and the taxpayer community went about their lives as if the two words were still there, so the fix didn’t seem to bother anyone. (Still, it was troublesome that the two words weren’t reinstated until four years later.) On the other hand, someone needs to cry foul when the taxpayer wins in a dispute against the revenue agency and the agency then goes to the legislature to get a retroactive fix to win the game it previously lost. Like the Washington DOR in Dot Foods, tax agencies could easily and often raise the specter of fiscal disaster if they are asked to – gasp – abide by their own statutes. We, as a people, pride ourselves that we follow the rule of law. Law is there to bind the government as well as the governed. If the government can change the rules after the game is over, then we don't have law, we have tyranny. Let’s not go down that path. PRESS RELEASE-- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 7, 2017 Lahaina, HI - WMTA ANNOUNCES SPECIAL SPEAKERS COMING TO PARTICIPATE IN EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS West Maui Community Disaster Planning Meetings Scheduled for Thursday, June 15, 2017 at Lahaina Civic Center Amphitheater at 5:30 p.m. Guest speakers will be Michele Liberty, Maui County Director & Disaster Program Director of the U.S. Red Cross Hawaii State Chapter presenting on the topic “Emergency Sheltering in Maui”; and Charnan Carroll, Disaster Preparedness Specialist of the Maui County Emergency Management Agency, presenting on the topic “Personal Preparedness Planning”. The WMTA is working with the Maui Emergency Management Agency, The Pacific Disaster Center, and the State Emergency Management Agency on developing a customized disaster plan designed to meet West Maui’s specific needs. The isolation from the Island’s major hospital and airport, due to frequent road closures, fires and flooding, have highlighted the need for special preparedness planning. The Hawaiian Hazards and Resilience Program (HHARP) is a series of monthly workshops, presented by subject-matter experts, to provide education for hazard understanding and offer tools and information resources to guide community mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery planning. The current meeting schedule follows:
These meetings are free and open to the public. There is ample parking for Lahaina Amphitheatre is on lot by District Courthouse adjacent to Entry Gate. The West Maui Taxpayers Association invites you to join us and be a part of the solution to plans that may well be the reason why lives will be saved when disasters strike. Please put these meetings on your calendar and plan to attend! More Information on WMTA and Disaster Preparedness can be found at www.westmaui.org. WMTA Shares these commentaries, without taking a position unless otherwise noted, to bring information to our readers To view the archives of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii's commentary click here. Weekly Commentary
For the Week of May 28, 2017 Human Casualties at the Legislature By Tom Yamachika, President Our legislature this year has had several casualties. We expect quite a few bills to be tossed aside during the legislative process. However, in recent years we have had more than the average number of human casualties, the most recent being Speaker of the House Joe Souki and Senate Ways and Means Chair Jill Tokuda. The casualties in this legislature were not limited to those two. Rep. Beth Fukumoto used to be the House Minority Leader, which made her the ranking Republican in our legislature (our Senate has no Republican members this year). She was deposed and replaced on February 1st. Rep. Angus McKelvey from Maui was chair of the influential House Committee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, but was shown the door on March 13th in a three-way switcheroo of House committee chairs. Significant shake-ups occurred in the Senate two years earlier. Senate President Donna Kim was given the boot on May 5, 2015, the last day of the 2015 session. Four days earlier, Senate Health Committee Chair Josh Green was stripped of his chairmanship in the thick of conference committee negotiations over the medical marijuana bill. These politicians are still alive and well, and they all still hold seats in the current legislature. But it can't be a pleasant experience having a Trump-type "You're fired" resolution with your name on it being discussed and voted on in a large Capitol auditorium with the outcome predetermined. The question I have is this. If there is a position taken by a committee chair on one bill or one issue that is not reflecting the wishes of the committee, why can't the committee simply reject the chair's recommendation and take the position they need to? Or why can't the body come up with a different position in a floor vote, which is not at all uncommon and was in fact done this year (leading to the second Senate conference draft on the rail bill SB 1183)? The legislative system is set up so we don't need to expect the chair to be right 100% of the time. In these instances, all of the legislative leaders worked really hard, were familiar with the issues, and came to a reasoned judgment. Everyone went along with the chair 98% of the time. In Chair Tokuda's case, for example, the "unreasonable" position of giving the City no surcharge extension was in Senate Draft 2, which was approved by her committee 8-0 and by the full Senate 25-0. Senate members who want to express concerns or displeasure have the option to vote “Aye with reservations” as well as “No,” but no one did either. And then, of course, literally hundreds of other bills passed through her committee with no visible indication of dissent. To be fair, we can't see what went on in the back rooms, where the committee chairs can quietly kill bills by refusing to schedule a hearing or vote on them. If a committee chair is abusing power or acting despotically, stripping away the position may be appropriate; barring that, the strong committee chair system is designed to give chairs a great deal of discretion, and when that discretion is used to someone’s disadvantage both the system and the person using it bear responsibility. In most places, if you get it right 98% of the time you won't get a pink slip. In our legislature, you can get the ax. It's hard to imagine a more thankless job. Except, maybe, being on the board of directors of a condominium association. If we want talented people serving us in the halls of our legislature, we can’t get in the habit of switching them around like the Flavor of the Month. We need to figure out a way to treat them with dignity. |
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