Remember when Utah had a term-limit law for the Legislature and executive offices, like the governor?
Well, we had one for 10 years, until the Legislature in its wisdom repealed it. Oh, and legislators repealed it just a few years BEFORE the law would have forced any lawmakers from office after serving 12 consecutive years.
The main argument, as I recall, was that there was such "natural" turnover among legislators that a term-limit law wasn't needed. Yes, there is turnover. But it doesn't come at the hands of voters. It comes, as the 2006 election shows, mainly through voluntary retirements.
About one-fourth of the 2007 Utah Senate and one-fifth of the state House are new legislators.
While that sounds like a healthy turnover, if you exclude retirements, only two senators and four House members actually lost their seats at the polls — and that out of 91 legislative races.
For the 57th Legislature that takes office the first of the year, 82 percent of the senators who ran for re-election in 2006 won.
For the House, an amazing 93.75 percent of representatives who ran won.
After the tens of thousands of dollars and volunteer hours in the 2006 legislative contests, the Senate stayed the same — 21 Republicans and only eight Democrats.
Democrats were able to pick up one seat in the House. The new Republican majority there is 55-20.
The GOP holds iron-clad two-thirds majorities in both houses, as they often have over the last 30 years.
That means without any Democratic votes, the Republicans are in complete control of setting budgets, adopting Utah constitutional amendments, and passing bills and resolutions.
As you may already know, the Utah State Tax Commission has decided to no longer include estimated budget surpluses/deficits in its monthly TC23 state revenue collection report.
The four commissioners — two Republicans, two Democrats — say that they can't adequately re-create the economic models used by former Tax Commission chief economist Doug Macdonald, who retired suddenly last spring after receiving several letters from commissioners telling him not to give his own opinion about tax matters to legislators and the public.
I thought it downright odd that the expert economists at the commission couldn't reproduce Macdonald's work, especially after one tax commissioner told me that it was "several legislators" who suggested that the commission no longer estimate running budget surpluses.
You see, over the years I've seen great discomfort among some legislators over Macdonald's estimates showing huge tax surpluses — which leads to political pressure to both spend more on state programs and give tax cuts.
And, of course, we wouldn't want the public to actually KNOW if their tax dollars are coming in way over or way under budget. Knowledge, after all, can be a dangerous thing in the hands of amateurs.
So, getting the fourth-month TC23 report of actual tax collections (no surplus estimates), I asked Macdonald in November if he could rerun some of his economic models to see what kind of surpluses the state was running in 2006-07, which ends June 30.
He said it looked to him like we were running a $150 million surplus over the first four months of this fiscal year. For the whole year, then, the state could have a $450 million surplus — a record.
And guess what? When Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. released his 2007-08 budget recommendation two weeks later, he (as governors always do) included a surplus update for this current year.
And the governor's group of esteemed economists predicted a $498.2 million surplus this year.
Pretty good work by Macdonald, I say — and he didn't have all of the figures and information that Huntsman's economic team had.
Now GOP leaders in both the House and Senate say they will try — without the Tax Commission — to issue quarterly budget surplus/deficit projections. The details are still being worked out.
I say good riddance to the cowardly tax commissioners in this matter, who apparently didn't want to ruffle legislators' budget surplus feathers.
Let's hope that the Legislature can come up with unbiased figures. Otherwise, I'll be bugging Macdonald to give me estimates for years to come.
Deseret Morning News political editor Bob Bernick Jr. may be reached by e-mail at bbjr@desnews.com