Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

The Republican majority on the Texas House Ways and Means Committee has recommended a tax bill that provides school property tax relief primarily by socking it to consumers.

True, homeowners — especially those in upscale neighborhoods — would see a lower property tax bill. But for most people, the reduction would be not much, maybe a few hundred dollars a year, and that reduction would be offset by paying that much and more in higher sales taxes.

Under the House committee plan, the sales tax would go up by 1 cent per dollar, to 7.25 cents. Where local sales taxes total 2 cents per dollar, including Austin, consumers would pay 9.25 cents on every dollar purchase. And the sales tax would be extended to more products and services: bottled water, auto repairs and computer programming.

Businesses, particularly those with a lot of property, would benefit much more from the tax cut than homeowners, particularly those with modest incomes and modest homes. Even Gov. Rick Perry supported increasing the homestead exemption so that middle and working class homeowners would get more benefit from a property tax cut, but the House committee majority saw no need and left it out.

The committee bill would close some loopholes in the state franchise tax on business, which has effectively become a voluntary tax, but it would rope in only an additional 10,000 businesses to pay it. The Democrats supported a plan that would have had about 375,000 more businesses pay, at their option, either the franchise tax or a new tax on payrolls. And Democrats would raise the sales tax by only a half-cent.

The Ways and Means Committee recommended approval of its bill on a 5-4 vote on party lines, and there was a whiff of desperation afterward. The committee chairman, Rep. Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, said, "We passed the best bill at this time that we could pass out." Those are not the words of a proud lawmaker, and no wonder. Keffer and others had tried for months to overhaul the state's taxation of businesses and require more of them to pay at least something. Instead, he ended up going along with Perry's much more limited plan for closing franchise tax loopholes.

The Senate — and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst — previously rejected a one-cent increase in the sales tax, and neither should go weak in the knees now.

But the danger is growing that Republican lawmakers and the governor, caught between their political need to cut school property taxes for constituents and their constitutional obligation to balance the budget, finally will pass out a mess of a tax plan, not because it represents a reasonable compromise but because they fear the embarrassment of ending the special session with no new school finance plan at all — for the fourth time.

Better that they be embarrassed than the state be stuck with a tax plan that mostly spares business and sticks it to consumers