Abele Versus Abele: The Sales Tax Issue In His Own Words

Yesterday, I wrote about how Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele tapped in his inner Tommy Thompson by advocating for a sales tax to build a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. I also pointed out he was being rather hypocritical regarding the sales tax, depending on who would benefit from it.

That caused enough of a rise that one of his people got WTMJ, where he made is pro-"sales tax to help the millionaires" comments, to give them a link to his comments, which they promptly posted in the comment thread.

Here's the link to his comments, (at least until Abele gets WTMJ to take it down again). And yes, I say it was one of his people. Do you think WTMJ would respond to a similar request from you or I, especially that quickly?

Again, Abele was gushing about a proposed sales tax to build a new arena for a basketball team for which he owns season tickets. The team is owned my a millionaire. The land developers would all be millionaires.

And what would the people who pay the sales tax for it get? A chance to drop a day's wage to see some more millionaires play basketball?

But Abele has a much different tone when it comes to a sales tax to save the transit system:

While Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele agrees transit is in jeopardy, he says he’s not prepared to back a sales tax option.

“The sales tax is about the most regressive tax you can have, it hits most disproportionately, the people who least can afford to be hit on it,” Abele says.
Abele says another drawback to a sales tax for transit, is that it would essentially let the state off the hook -- for money it’s supposed to be providing to the county for transit.

“Any time we raise local revenue for a service that used to be provided by shared revenue at the state, we’re giving the state another reason to sort of back out funding and push that funding locally, and we’re already paying taxes in to the state out of which we are supposed to be getting the transit funding,” Abele says.

Well, that's not entirely true.

If the sales tax had been allowed to be passed as it was approved of in a referendum four years ago, it would have cut people's property taxes. And a healthy transit system would allow tens of thousands of people to regain access to jobs, people could stimulate the economy by getting out and about to stores and places of entertainment. And our regional economy would grow instead of losing ground as it is doing now.

As I wrote last night, it would be a nice change to have a county executive that sticks up for the people instead of sticking it to them.