Over at Tertium Quids, Norm Leahy takes the Editorial Department to task for being insufficiently conservative. That’s fine; a lot of folks take us to task for being insufficiently liberal, too.

What’s not so fine is misrepresenting the newspaper’s position, which Leahy does in abundance.

(1) He’s already had to climb down a bit regarding his claim that the paper supports higher taxes. As my colleague Bob Rayner notes, we’ve supported cutting taxes elsewhere to make a hike in the gasoline tax revenue-neutral.

Leahy cites one passage in one editorial about revenue neutrality and labels it “conditional advocacy.” He must have missed this passage in an earlier one:

Lawmakers should offset the gasoline tax hike by cutting taxes elsewhere—perhaps by completing the long-delayed full implementation of the car-tax cut. (The car tax is not a road user fee; it is a levy on property.) This will require economies in other state programs. Deal with it. Set priorities. If the transportation crisis is as dire as the governor et al. claim, then other services that reaped the proceeds from Mark Warner’s massive tax hike four years ago should now move to the back seat.

That isn’t terribly conditional, is it? No.

(2) But, Leahy says, the T-D also has supported allowing local-option taxes in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. True. But there is a significant difference between supporting the option in those regions to raise taxes, as we have repeatedly done, and supporting the raising of taxes in those regions, as we have never done. We also supported the option of voting for John Kerry in 2004—but we never supported John Kerry.

Leahy says we support telecommuting. True. I’m not sure how that qualifies as ideological deviationism, but it’s true nonetheless.

(3) He says we support mass transit. True in part and false in part. I thought we had been pretty clear when we wrote:

Public transit has its place. That place is in densely populated urban centers such as Northern Virginia and the Richmond region. From a cost-benefit perspective, bus service, commuter rail, and similar programs make little sense in most of the Old Dominion. Virginia (population density: 191 people per square mile) is not New Jersey (1,175) or even Massachusetts (816). Building a huge transit network where no demand exists won’t make people ride; it will merely create a white elephant.

(4) Leahy says we are against sprawl. To be precise, we have opposed govevernment “policies that subsidize sprawl.” We have said “new development [should] pay for itself.” Again, I’m not sure how that qualifies as a departure from limited-government principles, but perhaps Leahy is reading from a different conservative catechism.

(5) Then Leahy says “the paper is for . . . limiting choice and property rights.” To quote an infamous Washington Post correction about evangelicals, there is no factual basis for that statement.

We have been almost strident defenders of property rights. See, e.g., a February 19, 2006, editorial, “Kelo Redux”: “Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London was to property rights largely as Plessy v. Ferguson was to racial equality...”

(6) Finally, he says the paper supports “massive wealth transfers to prop-up economically inefficient transit.” Again, there is no basis in fact for that statement.

If Leahy doesn’t like the newspaper’s positions on the issues, that’s fine. Lots don’t. But it would be nice if he’d get them right before he decides he doesn’t like them.

This is one of the best sites I have ever found. Thanks!!! Very nice and informal. I enjoy being here.

Agree, but-.

One problem is that tolls really are taxes.

Another problem we cut taxes back when the infrastructure was crumbling all over the nation. It’s like a need existed back then but we delayed it, put if off for the future, and now the bill is coming due. Whaddya do ?

Plus, we love growth. Growth has both good and bad to it.

Virginia might be in worse shape than other states. I really don’t know. That’s kinda technical and have not dived into it deeply (like T-D has). Not sure I trust VDOT either.

100N bureaucrats + 1000N budget = waste and corruption.

Offsetting new taxes would be a fine idea if you could trust our elected representitives to actually follow thru with it. The fact that car tax cuts have never been fully implemented only proves my point.

More often what we get are new taxes and promises of tax cuts in the future that are broken because of some world ending crisis that requires the immediate injection of boatloads of cash and the hiring of another 1000 state union employees to pick up the load of 2 guys who just retired.

The Times Dispatch supported the Richmond meals tax increase for the white elephant downtown arts center.

At least one Mayoral candidate is talking about this disaster:

Goldman for Mayor - 25 June 2008 - For Immediate Release - Contract, 804-833-6313

“Given today’s news about potential utility cost increases, given that the Mayor concedes that Richmonders are being squeezed by rising living costs, and that new city budget due to go into effect next week contains record government taxes and spending, my opponents support for a huge new taxpayer-funded subsidy the public had been promised would never be necessary is big issue in this campaign”

“My friends Dwight, Robert and Bill need to get some backbone, and do what an Elected Mayor was created to do: stop the old Richmond politics of buying political support with public money such as this indefensible operating subsidy.”

(Richmond) - Paul Goldman, candidate for Mayor said that “it is time for a fundamental change from the old politics of my opponents. Dwight, Robert and Bill seem to forget that most people in Richmond have modest incomes, and they caught in a tough economic squeeze that is really hurting small businesses, indeed the entire private sector which is the engine that creates the jobs.”

“I am the only candidate for Mayor who has ever been interested in making sure there is a full accountability of all the public money spent on this project and of making sure the facts are presented to the public."”

“Until I started working at City Hall, there was no public accountability, even internal city government accountability, of the public funds spent on this project as admitted by the then City Finance director.

Mr. Pantele had never asked for it nor had any other member of City Council.

In Mr. Grey’s second report on the project for the Wilder Administration - which concedes that the modernization of the Carpenter Center is only possible right now due to my City of the Future plan foresight - there is no mention of the need for a huge new taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.

Earlier this week, I proposed a bold “Economic Growth” plan to slash business taxes 50%, cut wasteful and unnecessary city bureaucratic spending by $15 million, along with more than a dozen other specific ideas to create jobs and produce new revenue for our city so begin lifting the social, personal and governmental costs of poverty from our citizens.

We already have the most expensive City Hall and City Council in Virginia.

We need to cut taxes and spending, not burden residents with yet another new $500,000 politically-inspired public subsidy for a private group.”

I would take T-D to task for being insufficiently liberal more often, but I can’t see the problem in having both liberal and conservative papers to choose from. It would be “better” if the editorial page were more neutral. I don’t define neutral as equal number of lib and con columns but neutral as less bias, the same thing you rag NYT and WaPo for on a regular basis.

I love the way hardcore conservatives skewer themselves with this insistence on no new taxes. When a need arises, they either have to think of some clever way to explain it away, like tax revenue-neutral, or tolls, or fees, or else just dig in the heels and refuse to do anything, as in the current impasse in the Gen. Assembly.

Whatever they do, it will be a tax. They just don’t allow themselves the liberty of calling it a tax, but it’s a tax. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a tax.

Tolls are a tax, by the way. A tax paid directly at the toll booth. The difference between a fee and a tax. There is none. Pay me now or pay me later. A regressive tax.

I don’t see anything wrong with the T-D position, but that is because I am not a hardcore conservative. Find it all so grimly amusing, proof that hardheads do exist.

Also find it amusing that hardcore conservatives never seem to find anything, anything at all, conservative enough. McCain is damaged goods. Flip flopper. Doesn’t get much worse than that.  How could any decent and honorable man be a nasty flip-flopper.

I mean, do you have to be Ghengis Khan to please these people ?

Strom Thurmond ? The missing link ? Someone walking straight out of the Old Testament ? Jerry Falwell’s firstborn ? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ?

What does it take to please a conservative. 

At least, as an Independent aka Centrist, no need to please Tertium Quids. Bart’s problem. Not mine.

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