True Lies
Van Hilleary finally nails the real budget crisis
In announcing his candidacy for governor, Van Hilleary said there has been a lot of "intellectual dishonesty" in the debate over state tax revenue.

Left unsaid: who Hilleary believes has been intellectually dishonest.

For the record, I don't think he meant Phil Bredesen, the likely Democrat nominee, since both man are saying they can manage the state just fine without a tax increase. No, Hilleary was very likely referring to the current governor and administration.

If he needs an example to prove that allegation, here's a good one:

In his latest press release announcing monthly revenue data, Finance Commissioner Warren Neel said the data showed "practically no growth in holiday sales tax collections" in Tennessee, but he arrived at that conclusion by carefully doctoring the data. Neel says the data shows a 0.39 percent decline in sales tax revenue - but he excluded revenue from sales of vehicles, one of the single largest sources of sales tax revenue.

Neel did so because of "robust" sales of vehicles, which caused a surge in revenue. That's intellectually dishonest.

Last summer Neel was using falling auto sales to justify an income tax. He told the State Funding Board at a hearing attended by dozens of legislators and reporters that vehicle sales were a major part of the state's sales tax revenue and falling auto sales were causing revenue to grow more slowly than anticipated.

Back then, Neel found it useful to highlight revenue from vehicle sales because it was declining and that helped the income tax argument. But today, Neel wants you to ignore the same revenue source. Why? Because it is rising, and undercuts the income tax argument.

This coldly calculated and intellectually dishonest misrepresentation of facts is designed to boost the governor's proposed income tax.

Want more evidence? Okay: Neel's press releases didn't start excluding revenue from vehicle sales until overall sales tax revenues stabilized in October and started trending upward again in part due to rising vehicle sales. That month, revenue was flat. But Neel portrayed it as falliyng 3.2 percent, simply by excluding revenue from vehicle sales.

The specific example above is just one of many examples of how in the past four years, Tennessee's sitting governor has become increasingly unfamiliar with honesty. Now that Van Hilleary has pointed out the administration's systematic use of deception, let's hope he continues to hammer away. Tennessee deserves the truth.