Angry voters, or just distrustful?

KENNETT, Mo. -- The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has expressed the interesting concept that Missourians overwhelmingly rejected Proposition B on Aug. 6 because they were angry at just about everyone from state highway engineers to fraudulent corporate presidents.

It may require a major leap to associate Kenneth Lay of Enron fame with the 73 percent who marked "no" on the proposed two-part tax increase to rebuild and modernize state highways.

It's not that I don't feel the pain of stockholders who were shocked out of their wallets to learn that their net worth had suddenly been used to enrich a few greedy and corrupt corporate swindlers, but it's hard to draw a correlation between worthless shares of stock or retirement benefit checks with inadequate and sometimes crumbling streets and roads on the way to and from work each day. That's like turning off the water faucet because it doesn't deliver champagne.

Let's be realistic and admit that whatever crimes have been committed within the halls of the Missouri Department of Transportation in Jefferson City do not resemble in any degree the fraudulent schemes of a relatively small number of corporate crooks in Texas and a few other states. No one who first promised better highways under the 15-year plan was guilty of anything but inaccurate cost projections, and since when did promises uttered by any government official or anyone wanting to be one ever become sacrosanct?

Have we forgotten all those promises made in the 2000 campaign about how wonderfully benevolent the federal government would become and how honesty and integrity would henceforth be the bywords of Beltway bandits?

Like everyone else, I suspected Prop B would go down in flames, and so after exercising my constitutional right to join the minority, I stationed myself beyond the required legal distance from a voting precinct and proceeded to engage my fellow voters in conversations about the issues they had just passed judgment on.

When the question was phrased "Did you vote against Proposition B," all I received was a blank stare. "What's Proposition B?" was the most frequent response, so it requires explanation. That was generally answered either with "I'm not gonna vote for any more taxes" or "I didn't know what that was all about."

Angry voters? Some, I suppose, including those who are always in such a mood when that pejorative word "taxes" becomes the subject at hand, but as that great Republican philosopher, Spiro Agnew, once observed: "The angry voter is most often the anguished voter and there is no room in America for anguish." I'll let you interpret that profound observation of the American electoral condition.

So back to my little unofficial poll, which I found both reassuring and disturbing.

I recognized I was in Missouri, one of the lowest per capita tax states in America, when voters began sounding off on their high tax bills. Shucks, if we Americans didn't believe in complaining about taxes, we'd still be driving on the wrong side of the road and our leader would be the queen of England.

In reality, one of the most important components of any state's capital structure is its transportation system, which in 2002 parlance means just one thing: highways. Oh, we still have railroads, which carry a lot of the basic ingredients of production but seldom deliver finished products because large trucks do it much more swiftly, which in today's industrial world is a prime ingredient for success. If we depended on railroads and barges to meet the demands of today's industrial economy, America would rank right along with Chad and Afghanistan.

As something of a stepping stone to both the eastern and western half of the nation, Missouri is critically located and its transportation structure is critically important to much of the nation's manufacturing sector. Capital can be transferred by wire anywhere in the United States, but new cars, refrigerators and computers, not to mention food, apparel and medicine, virtually demand over-the-road delivery in the shortest time possible. One of the reasons Missourians voted against Proposition B is they didn't acknowledge this rather nebulous, but quite relevant, point.

And the reason voters didn't understand is that so few trustworthy Missourians reminded them of this important fact. As there is when any potentially controversial measure is submitted for voter approval, there was a great deal of humming and hawing over Proposition B, at least part of it attributable to the gathering up of several tax levies and placing them all into one referendum.

This mistake can be placed on the doorstep of the General Assembly, whose members tried to combine several smaller tax increases into one package, thus creating a monster that frightened just about everyone.

The one advantage that accrued to the plan's benefit is the comparatively low Missouri tax on fuel, but this advantage was lost when lawmakers added in a sales tax boost as well. Whether the economy is good or bad or somewhere in between, boosting a sales tax is risky business and the rewards have to be nothing short of monumental to win popular approval. Motorists want better roads and highways but the general public can exist without them, particularly if the sponsoring bureaucracy, with egg on its face, has too frequently been a part of the problem rather than the solution.

As the final nail in the coffin, the failure of the state's elected officials, particularly the governor and our legislators who fashioned the details of the referendum, to provide enthusiastic and universal support was enough to scuttle even issues dealing with God, country and motherhood.

Missourians are now left in limbo, holding the detritus of under-performing state officials, with only a road map that points to destinations we can't get to from here.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.