TAKE THE REFUND TO COURT

State Auditor Margaret Kelly is claiming that Missouri taxpayers are owed refunds up to $618 million, or four times greater than the $147 million Gov. Mel Carnahan has announced will be paid to 2 million Missouri taxpayers in 1997. Carnahan's refund works out to $41 for each taxpayer. Kelly, who is running to replace Carnahan in the governor's mansion, says of the Carnahan refund estimate: "They didn't know what they were doing." Kelly says her office will soon file suit asking a judge to settle a long-running dispute with the governor about defining state revenue.

Nonsense, says Mark Ward, Carnahan's budget director. Alleging political expediency on Kelly's part, Ward says the state auditor is "the prime example of the empty barrel making the noise." Carnahan says the refunds are owing because of unique circumstance arising out of the 1993 flood in which Missourians' personal income plunged. Revenue for the last two years are surging by double digits, triggering refunds required by the original Hancock Amendment, which requires refunds whenever tax revenue grows faster than personal income. Kelly consistently has maintained that the tax lid was exceeded due to the $310 million tax increase Carnahan pushed through the Democrat-majority Legislature in 1993.

This long-running dispute has roots back to the early 1980s when Kelly disagreed with Republican Gov. John Ashcroft over many similar points. It is good to see Kelly prepared to take the issue to court. Political rhetoric can be laid aside, and a perennial dispute can be settled.

One thing, though, is certain. Following Mel Carnahan's heavy tax increases on working Missourians in which he denied them the vote he promised during his 1992 campaign, nearly every category of state tax revenue is showing huge, double-digit increases. Overtaxed Missourians are due one of two things: either the higher refunds Kelly says are owed, or, better yet, action by lawmakers to cut taxes, the sooner the better. If politics enters into it, so be it. That is the way issues are decided in a democracy.