This morning's tweets

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OK Senate Votes To Abolish Income Tax http://bit.ly/hY7GK7

Apparently some Democrats in the Oklahoma Senate wanted to play chicken with the Republicans and it backfired on them. A Democrat attached an amendment to a Republican's bill, thinking Republicans weren't really willing to go that far. The amendment? Abolish the state's income tax. Guess what? The Republicans went there.

RT @OklahomaAFP: Deflecting Attention from Lowering Property Tax Cap Misguided and Uncalled For http://bit.ly/dNEi52

What Leonard Sullivan did to Stuart Jolly was pure viciousness. That having been said:

SJR 5 would lower the property tax cap from 5% to 3% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. Well, fine. Is that all?

Which leads me to my next tweet:

How about capping property tax rate increases at 0%? Or better yet, how about eliminating property taxes altogether?

Seriously, why are we even considering increases in tax rates? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can to reduce taxes and thus deprive government of revenue, forcing it to cut back?

This is a trend that has been worrying me ever since the governor's State of the State Address. Instead of talking about reducing the size of government, Fallin stated that she only wanted to restrain growth because "the growth of government shouldn’t outpace growth in the private sector." That doesn't sound like a commitment to smaller government to me, and wishy-washy proposals like SJR 5 don't, either. Could it be that it was precisely this kind of talk that lead Senate Democrats to believe Republicans would blink when they ran a truly radical statement on taxes up the pole?

Thankfully it looks like some Republicans have the nerve to be more ambitious with their cutting than that.