Christmas tree tax revealed a tone deafness

Admittedly, public reactions can be hard to predict. But a plan to tax Christmas trees should have been a no-brainer.

Even if you buy the Obama administration's line that the 15-cent per tree charge really was a fee, not a tax, the difference is lost on a lot of regular Whos in Whoville. Either way, pal, you're messing with Christmas.

A lot of people saw the irony right away. A government that shies away from the word "Christmas," and whose courts don't let school kids sing religious songs, shouldn't tell us what type of tree to buy. Washington can't have it both ways.

Give the administration credit for being nimble. After the uproar hit on Thursday, the White House quickly went from arguing the technical differences between a tax and a fee to announcing that the Department of Agriculture "is going to delay implementation and revisit this action." The tree tax got run over by a runaway public-relations disaster reindeer. With the one-year clock ticking on a difficult re-election bid, the president didn't want the label Grinch anywhere near his campaign.

But being quick enough to smell a political disaster isn't the same as losing a tone-deaf misunderstanding of the free market and why this tax (sorry, a forced government surcharge on a product can't be called by any other name) was a bad idea in the first place.

It never was a question about whether it was a tax or a fee. It never had to do with whether Christmas tree growers supported the extra charge. They did, overwhelmingly, because it would have helped them against their main competitors, artificial trees. Government has no business choosing sides in free-market competition, and that is why this idea was bad from the start.

The money would have gone to a 12-member board whose job would have been to "strengthen the Christmas tree industry's position in the marketplace." The government said this would be no different than how it promotes milk, cotton, beef or pork with ads and slogans that have become part of American culture (got milk?).

In each of those cases, however, the ads promote a type of product that is produced by several competing businesses. No one of them gets an unfair advantage.

The Christmas tree promotion would have pushed one type of product — fresh-cut trees — over another. It would be like promoting one particular brand of milk over another.