What our elected representatives should say: taxes

I will never raise taxes lightly. I will always seek out your feedback before supporting a measure that raises your taxes. If, however, I think that raising taxes is necessary, I won’t hesitate to do it. I believe to pledge to never raise taxes is either a major abdication of responsibility or an admission that you don’t know much about governing and are living in a fantasy land. There are a lot of different taxes that impact people in many different ways, and frequently one or more of them has to be increased. A responsible representative would tell you that rather than making you a promise that he or she knows will have to be broken, whether he or she does the promise breaking or wimps out and pushes the burden of doing so up or down to other elected officials. I won’t ever hesitate to raise taxes if that is what I think has to be done. I won’t ever hesitate to do what I think has to be done, regardless of how popular my position is. That is a pledge I have no problem making.