The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

I heard Randy Kuhl's latest ad on the radio today. Using the term "Liberal Eric Massa", it charged that Massa wants to raise estate taxes, income taxes, and also create a sales tax on Internet purchases. The ad also charged that Massa's tax plan would result in an average tax burden increase of $2000 per person in the 29th.

Massa has published his tax position here. Like every other politician on earth, there are no plans there to raise taxes, only to redistribute the tax burden. In Massa's case, he wants to move it off of the middle class. I'm sure that Kuhl can back up the arithmetic in his ad, so he must have chosen some group on the fringe of middle class, declared that group average, and calculated the tax change as $2K. That's a standard operating procedure for ads like this.

I heard this ad on the Bob Lonsberry show, while driving to the debate in Canandaigua. On my return trip, I heard Bob say that when a politician promises a tax cut, the first thing we should ask is where the money's coming from to finance the cut. Good question, Bob.

At today's debate, Randy Kuhl said he wanted to balance the budget immediately. He also supports the war in Iraq. There aren't enough tax revenues to do both. So, on the logic of his ad, he, too, wants to raise taxes. Also, as the Massa campaign points out, Kuhl has a track record of 24 years in the New York legislature, many of those years in leadership positions. New York's tax burden is among the nation's highest. There's no evidence that Kuhl's ever worked to lower taxes.

I think there's a core group of voters who hate taxes so much that they will respond to this type of ad. But most voters have heard ads like this so often that they're skeptical. For those folks, ads like these are so much noise. Even Lonsberry, who's quite conservative, has a hard time buying generic political claims on taxes. These voters want to see some action to lower taxes before they buy into election-year tax scares.