For some lawmakers, diving deep into the details of state tax policy is a tedious exercise akin to a dreaded teeth-cleaning.
They know it has to be done, but they suffer through it with as little complaint as they can muster.
Not state Sen. Brandt Hershman. During last week’s nearly daylong first meeting of the legislature’s “blue ribbon” panel assigned to study business taxes, the Buck Creek Republican looked almost gleeful.
As a long lineup of tax experts wielded data showing that Indiana is among the best states in the nation for low business taxes, the normally reserved Hershman engaged in some modest fist-pumping.
Any metric that showed Indiana ahead of Illinois in the job-creation climate – and there were many – elicited from him more good cheer.
The material presented to the bipartisan commission was both dense and voluminous. The committee’s hearing room, overcrowded in the morning, was replete with empty seats by afternoon.
As reams of metrics poured forth, Hershman was in his element. The chairman of the Senate Tax and Finance Policy Commission seemed in policy-wonk heaven.
“I enjoy it because it does have a direct impact on job creation and the health of our economy,” Hershman said later. “So while it is weighty material, it matters. It matters more than many things,” he added.
Hershman has happily taken on the task of leading the panel that’s reviewing the competitive advantages and disadvantages of Indiana’s state and local business tax structure.
Earlier this year, he was lead sponsor of Senate Enrolled Act 1, which reduces Indiana’s corporate income tax rate to 4.9 percent from 7 percent by 2021, and gives counties the option of reducing or eliminating some business personal property taxes.
He was called both a hero and a heel for it. What business sees as critical for growth, local government, which is so reliant on the revenue source, fears.
There’s a sense of mission to Hershman, honed to a sharpness that started as a kid sitting at the kitchen table on the family farm. He remembers his dad talking about federal farm and environmental policies and the impact they were having on him and his neighbors.
Hershman didn’t grow up in a political family, but as a Purdue University student studying journalism in the late 1980s, he was interested enough in politics that he went to hear then-President Ronald Reagan speak at Mackey Arena.
It was life-changing, he said. Inspired by Reagan’s vision, he sent off a letter to the White House, asking to work there. Months later, he was offered an internship in the communications office – an offer he was forced to turn down because he was recovering from a bad motorcycle accident.
A follow-up offer came from Reagan’s successor, in the form of a job, and Hershman went to work for the first President Bush.
Hershman has been back in Indiana for a long time, and back on the family farm, which he now manages.
But public policy remains a love. In 2010, he earned a certificate in tax administration and policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He finished law school last year, after taking “every tax course I could take,” he said.
Still guiding him is that Reagan speech 27 years ago, when the President spoke of American liberty, freedom and opportunity. And, as Hershman said, “how government could be a help in certain ways, but quite often it was an impediment to those foundational American principles.”
“Ronald Reagan was not anti-government,” Hershman said. “He was anti-excessive government. I think that’s a distinction that’s been lost in the ensuing years.”