The Wisdom of Hobbs

Several items of interest on Bill Hobb's weblog. Too many to quote much here, so just go there. Some highlights:

This year, the proposed income tax was backed by Tennessee's biggest
newspapers, its governor, and top leaders in the House and Senate. It had regular
cheerleaders in the political press, such as The Tennessean's Larry Daughtrey (see
below). The pro-income tax side even had a well-funded lobbying group, the badly
misnamed Tennesseans for Fair Taxation.

The opposition had no well-funded and organized counterpart to the pro-tax
lobbying organization and didn't have the backing of the major newspapers. The
Tennessee Institute for Public Policy, very involved in the first two years, was
absent from the debate this year. (Full disclosure: I worked for TIPP for five
months in 2001.) The ragtag opposition had just three small websites (this one,
TaxFreeTennessee.com and TnTaxRevolt.org) and their readers, who often took
it upon themselves to dig up the truth about Tennessee's budget, taxes,
government waste and other relevant facts and pass it on to one or more of those
websites, or to a few talk radio hosts.

Yet... and this is the cool part ... we won.

What he said.

He also provides a link to a three year old post by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame that is still worth reading today.

Finally, in this post, he dissects an op-ed piece in the Tennessean. Hobbs also gives the proper answer to those, mostly in the press, arguing that anti-taxers wanted higher sales tax. It wasn't that, but there were no other options given by Naifeh. This way, the issue is now on the election ballot, to be handed to the next governor and Legislature with an expectation on the part of Tennesseans that real reform will finally be addressed.

Until next time, that is all.