[The following was published in the St. Maries Gazette-Record 3/13/24 as a Letter to the Editor titled, “What Kind of Inner Wisdom.” Commentary follows].
A recent opinion letter warning against violations of the 1st Amendment (Weems: 3/6/24) – the part about not “establishing” a religion – might seem quaint in an irreligious age such as ours, but consider the following:
For some time now, the County Commissioners have been giving away tax exemptions to area church groups like candy at a parade. With the genie out of the bottle, churches are lining up with exemption requests, not just for their sanctuaries and parsonages, but for their income producing properties, as well. Some petitions have been granted, others not. One wonders what inner wisdom the Commissioners rely upon to make these decisions?
These, along with a litany of other tax waivers for sundry “hardships,” have created a steady stream of petitioners. If I didn’t know better, I might suspect that the Commissioners were “buying” votes in an Election Year.
But the Commissioners are all Republicans, and patronage is supposed to be the sin of only the Democrats. So there must be some noblesse oblige at play.
Regardless, Weems might be right: tell the out-of-state newcomers who are to join the rest of us in footing the bills for the Commissioners’ largesse: “Welcome to Benewaheinshtan.”
James Stivers, Desmet
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Added comments: “Benewaheinshtan” would be a Deutschlander accent to “Benewah-ein-stan” or “Benewah as an authoritarian state.” “Noblesse oblige” would be a reference to the medieval “obligations of the nobles,” a practice of patronage to make local magistrates look good. The Commissioners, of course, being the nobles in this instance would be complying with state statutes to benefit the constituency which keeps the current regime in power.
While the County Commissioners have to this day for decades complained that the County has been robbed by the CDA Tribe of a tax base (Indian land being tax exempt) without adequate compensation from Boise – and uses that as an excuse for high property taxes – nevertheless, coffers must be full enough for this ongoing award of tax exemptions to churches, charities, and other non-profits. Dozens of exemptions and hardship “cancellations” have been added since this letter was published. It is an election year after all, and everybody is complaining about high taxes.
Some people have thought that my letter was an attack on churches and charities. Other than the fact that religious groups use charity for purposes of proselytizing, I invoke the words of George Washington when Virginia clerics complained of the disestablishment of the church: “People should not expect others to pay for their religion.”
The land tax system in Idaho is as convoluted as the Internal Revenue Code, with numerous instances of partisan patronage. The satirical “Equalization Board” is in Orwellian double-speak for the opposite practice of being “unequal.”
No one complains about an unjust law until it is enforced. And no one complains about high property taxes until they discover they don’t have the money to pay them.