Idaho Gov. Butch Otter is at it again. Last week, he launched a Web site to lure businesses from states that he says have raised their taxes. Earlier, he had sent out personal letters to business owners conveying the same message.
Otter, who first made his name as a libertarian member of the Idaho House of Representatives, always has been good at bombast. Veteran legislative reporters were fond of recalling that after one roll-call vote, he asked the speaker of the House to change his vote from no to hell no.
His new Web site, however, isn't particularly well done. One entry refers to the American Legislative Exchange Council's "Rick State, Poor State" study. That's "Rich State, Poor State," but maybe you should expect spelling errors from the governor's office of a state that just slashed public school appropriations by $128.5 million, or 7.5 percent, after a $48 million cut a year earlier.
The shots Otter takes at Washington and Oregon lawmakers are fair enough. Washington lawmakers did raise taxes, and voters in our state will be the final arbiters on whether new levies on candy, gum, and soda pop really are "job killers," as a Moses Lake lawmaker contends on Otter's Web site.
Over-the-top conservatism has played well in Idaho for years. Steve Symms, whom Idaho voters elected many times to the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, once made headlines by pushing for wheat sales to the outlaw nation of Libya despite restrictions against them. Later, Libya was implicated in the murder of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Longtime Idaho Congressman George Hansen trooped over to Iran while that renegade nation held Americans hostage. Hansen thought he could make headway with the Iranians, but came off as a buffoon.
Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth couldn't understand how salmon could be endangered when you could buy the fish in cans at Albertson's, and then there was Larry Craig, whose exploits don't need retelling.
Otter's Web site overlooks a few things. We are amidst a national recession, we're all in it together, and his efforts to pick off businesses in neighboring states overlook the commonality that we all share.
During the grand opening ceremony of the Post Falls Cabela's store in 2007, one employee muttered under his breath that the store was built just across the state line so the company could draw Spokane shoppers and still pay its workers less. Otter's Web site trumpets that Idaho's minimum wage is lower than Washington's, but unlike Washington's economic-development leaders, he doesn't say anything about the need to attract family-wage jobs.
It's simplistic to argue that Otter's approach results in nothing more than a race to the bottom. Businesses are deeply concerned about costs these days, Washington can do a better job of holding them in line, and both our state and Oregon face discouraging revenue forecasts. Maybe Idaho's cuts are a harbinger of things to come.
Yet, the big economic innovations of the future will be knowledge-driven, and Idaho's decision to cut education funding resulted in far less debate than such a step would have caused in Washington. In past recessions, Idaho governors, Republican and Democratic alike, made it a priority to maintain school funding. The idea of hiring more auditors to address known tax-collection problems in Idaho also was nixed. Otter accepted federal stimulus money for education only after blustering against it.
I'm sure Otter would contend that competition is a fair thing. Since that's the case, it would be fair for Washington to point out what he might have in mind for the children of the employees of the companies he's trying to attract.