Column - Fiscal Fruit Baskets Add Up

Apparently, the road to this week's hearings on state tax credits was paved with good intentions.

The first was held Tuesday in Cedar Rapids by a panel formed by Gov. Chet Culver. The governor became very interested in the subject after the state handed out millions of dollars in credits to filmmakers but forgot to get receipts. Some officials took lead roles in “Pink Slips,” and “Criminal Investigation.”

But those giveaways are only fish in a vast sea. More than 30 credit programs are on track to top $500 million in 2011, even as the state budget busts.

Still, it was clear Tuesday, if you really want friends in high places, be sure to get reincarnated as a tax credit.

Dubuque Mayor Roy Buol says various credits helped his town land so much investment and so many jobs that you get a hand cramp trying to jot it all down. “We wouldn't be the community we are without them,” he said.

The Iowa Taxpayers Association likes credits for research and development. So does the Iowa Biotech Association. The Iowa Historic Preservation Alliance made a case for preservation credits. Community foundations praised Endow Iowa credits. Iowa Advocates for Choice in Education love credits for gifts to private school scholarship funds.

Animators from Grasshorse Technologies never got a credit, but they got business from filmmakers who did, and who requested help with special effects. “Can you make a blood spatter?” was one, said company exec Kathy Buxton.

I really don't blame these folks for rushing in when the big fiscal pinata broke and free money dropped. But absent from the proceedings were stick-swinging lawmakers, who feverishly handed out goodies.

Blindfolds evidently kept them from seeing the bulging big-picture costs of their generosity. And oversight is so much less fun than handing out tax-free fiscal fruit baskets.

It's too bad legislators so obsessed with who smokes in a bar and who marries whom didn't care, for instance, that we handed out millions of dollars in R&D credits without so much as a public list of who got our money.

And where were “fiscal conservatives” when the legislature was creating credits that go on forever, on perpetual autopilot, with no sunset, no pause to evaluate and reauthorize?

Deeper thought at conception would have been swell, because most of these genies are now too big to go back into the bottle. And they're still growing, even now as we fire teachers, slash courts and close a mental health institute.

I'm still hopeful some good can come out of this. Maybe next time lobbyists ask for one more tax giveaway, a legislator will beat them off with a stick.