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Good afternoon, everybody. It's not too early to begin the post-mortem of the
2013 legislative session.
The regrettable news is if the vast middle class of Indiana fell asleep
and awoke today, they would find out that they hadn't missed anything.
Absolutely nothing has been done to help them.
Indiana remains in suspended stagnation
for the vast majority of Hoosiers
and they're being told that the status quo is just fine.
Why did the people of Indiana give a Republican governor immense powers,
two super majorities, virtually all the statewide offices,
and have them turn around and say that they were doing nothing to improve
their lives?
Let's look at some of the missed opportunities, and they're significant ones.
The most important thing the middle class needs is jobs
and they need middle-class jobs. They punted on the opportunity
to provide 30,000 private-sector jobs through the expansion of
health care under the Affordable Care Act.
Basically the only jobs bills that have passed this session,
if you can call them that, were the idea that you could sell
rabbits roadside without inspection
or you can now open up a business as an artisan distiller or moonshiner.
That's not what the people of Indiana and were looking for. They were
looking for real
tangible
economic development based on empowerment of the middle class
and improvement of consumer confidence.
Another missed opportunity:
the governor
decided it was important for the people of Indiana to have tax relief.
That wasn't our preferred way to help the middle class we said, "Look, if you're
going to do it then get money back in consumers' pockets. What we have through
this fight between the Republican super majorities and the governor is a
lose-lose
on the topic of taxation
because basically they've told the middle class that they can live without
revenues that are necessary to help them,
those revenues will just dissipate
and at the same time it doesn't put any money in their pockets.
It's the worst of both possible outcomes:
lost revenue that could be
used to help the middle class and people trying to get into the
middle class and at the same time,
maybe two years down the road an extra buck a week in their pocket
That is pathetic,
that's pathetic.
These tax cuts they talk about
are a sham.
The income tax cut only happens two years from now, which by the way, if the
governor doesn't
do their bidding they could repeal in the interim because we'll be working on a new
budget by then.
The corporate taxes
that they already talked about passed two years ago under a different
General Assembly and a different governor. They're including that in there.
Of course you have hope for the banks fund to be very important and you have an
inheritance tax speed-up
which does nothing for economic development and job growth.
It just merely helps,
it helps mourners and those who think they might be dead one day.
So the inheritance tax cut is not an economic plus.
And then finally we have to say a word or two about schools, this idea that they're
increasing school funding.
They aren't increasing anything.
You can make it look like you're having better numbers at the bottom of the sheet but
that's not the story.
They have not restored hardly any of the cuts cuts
that have been visited upon the
traditional classrooms of Indiana over the past four years.
Promised investments were taken away from the schools and all we said, is
"Look, these promised investments that you took away from the schools because of your
accounting errors,
not because of the recession, because
there were accounting errors,
get those schools back some of their money. They didn't do that, they redistributed it in
a way that
by the way gives big increases to Hamilton Southeastern,
to Carmel Clay schools
and big cuts to other schools and basically their school policy is "Look,
if you're doing a good and have plenty of resources, we're gonna give you more and
hopefully that will embarrass the schools that were taken away resources from
into doing better.
That's bad for schools.
Senator Lanane.
Thank you, Leader, I would agree with you.
I think the best way to characterize this session is that
it was a missed opportunity
because I always look at a session as an opportunity for us to solve problems
and obviously, as I think you touched upon, the biggest problem facing
Indiana right now is that
persistently high unemployment
and a middle class which is stuck with one of the nation's lowest
wages in the nation
and I was excited because we came into this session with the governor's
talk about
trying to address the skills gap,
the governor's discussion about really trying to
improve our vocational education system here in the state of Indiana so that we can
train the next generation of workers to
perform the the jobs that are going to be coming down the pipe,
but really we haven't done that at all in this session. We've done a lot of talk.
We did pass a bill
to perhaps set the stage for that
but we didn't really back it up with
any
real resources to accomplish these goals.
As far as this so-called,
you know, tax-cut, which has been
put into this budget, we haven't seen the printed budget yet, but we have been able to
look at it online
to a degree and yes, when you get into that, I would describe this as a
tax cut that's somewhere over the rainbow
because as you pointed out it doesn't really go into effect,
I think, in January 2015,
there's this 3% decrease that kicks in at that time,
which most people won't realize until the next year then when they go to file their
taxes
and then this
5%
reduction does not actually occur, doesn't go into effect until January 2017
in terms of what does that mean for your average taxpayer,
well okay at the 3%
rate for the average taxpayer,
that's actually in terms of what is left in their pocket from that tax cut, it's about
eighty cents a week,
eighty cents a week. And then it tops out
in 2017
when the full 5% kicks in at about $1.50 a week. Now, I'm not
real sure how that's going to stimulate the economy.
You know, you can't for eighty cents,
you're not even hardly going to be able to buy a pop at the local
filling station.
So the bulk of these tax cuts that they're talking about go to
either corporations, financial institutions or the well-off
so there is a,
it's an illusion
in terms of
it really being a true tax cut.
To characterize it as the largest tax cut,
to me, is just
complete fraud.
And of course, it's a gimmick because they go back and as you mentioned, they tack on
the corporate tax,
which was
passed in the past
and they include then,
these tax cuts
going forward, so it's not a meaningful tax cut
and it's not
it's not really addressing the real problems in the state of Indiana too, in
terms of getting a work force that's prepared
to do the future jobs of the economy,
improving our infrastructure,
putting the dollars into an infrastructural program that really could get
Indiana positioned to
have an improved economy.
We had an opportunity and then
you mentioned the ACA. We have no idea what's going to happen with the
implementation of the ACA and in that regard, I really feel that we've
had a dereliction of duty here.