This time it’s the Bismarck Tribune that gives us several paragraphs of largely meaningless, wishy-washy pap about the Americans for Prosperity’s ballot measure to cut income taxes.

Here’s the key excerpt:

An advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, intends to initiate legislation by way of the ballot box to cut personal income tax by 50 percent and corporation income tax by 15 percent.

Whether that comes off to people as a sound, responsible action may be correlated most to their attitude toward government spending. That, and whether they have a stake in particular areas of state spending that are important to them — public education, for instance. Or human services. Or, or, or ...

There may be few of us who are so impartial that we would pay no mind if spending on all programs and services were slashed by a certain percentage equally, across the board.

That begs the question of whether state spending should be cut or remain at the current level or whether programs and services should be funded more by the next Legislature — if it can be afforded.

Projections and reasonable economic forecasting notwithstanding, we simply can’t know where the state’s economy will be even two years in the future. Cutting off $280 million of expected state revenue from income taxes in taxable years 2009 and 2010 would be a serious decision to make, not knowing if revenue from oil and gas production and extraction taxes, for instance, will hold strong.

So, cutting taxes is a questionable move because the state might need that revenue a few years down the line, but increasing spending in the state some 24% somehow isn’t questionable?  The Bismarck Tribune is right.  In a few years, who knows if all the taxes the state is collecting from oil and gas production will be there.  And that’s exactly why growing the size of government is a terrible idea.  Because regardless of what happens with tax revenue, we’re still going to have to pay for that large government.

The thinking behind AFP’s ballot measure is that it will deny our state legislators, who clearly can’t control themselves when it comes to spending our money, access to a budget surplus to spend.  North Dakota does have “balance the budget” legislation that eliminates the possibility of a budget deficit, but our politicians have made it clear that if there’s a budget surplus they’re going to spend it.

Yet what happens should the oil tax revenues give out?  The budget will still have to balance, and the funds to maintain the government our politicians just got down expanding this last session will have to come from somewhere.  So we’ll likely end up with a tax hike.

The Tribune ends its op/ed with this:

The advocacy group’s plan may not be a good one at all, but its existence should provoke mainstream Republicans and Democrats to come up with a better proposition.

The problem is that we clearly can’t trust either the Republicans or Democrats in the state to exercise fiscal restraint.  They are going to grow the size of government every chance they get, so it is the duty of the people to deny them the funding it takes to expand government.