Republican governors across the nation are proposing tax increases — and backing off pledges to cut taxes — as they strike a decidedly un-Republican pose in the face of budget shortfalls and pent-up demands from constituents after years of budget cuts.
“My jaw dropped,” Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, a conservative Republican in Nevada, said after hearing Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, propose a $1.1 billion tax increase for education this month. “Whether we kill it by five votes or 15 votes or 25 votes, we are going to kill it.”
At least eight Republican governors have ventured into this once forbidden territory: There are proposals for raising the sales tax in Michigan, a tax on e-cigarettes in Utah, and gas taxes in South Carolina and South Dakota, to name a few. In Arizona, the new Republican governor has put off, in the face of a $1 billion budget shortfall, a campaign promise to eliminate the unpopular income tax there.
“It’s not based on partisanship; it’s based on common sense and good government,” said Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican who has urged voters to support a ballot measure that would raise $1.9 billion by increasing the sales tax and gas tax. “We’ve been underinvesting in Michigan for some time, so I view it as a way to, long term, save us resources.”
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Republicans say that these kind of tax reductions boost economic growth. But critics like Mr. Leachman argued that shifting from income tax to consumption-based tax does push the burden further down the income ladder, a sentiment echoed by Democratic lawmakers in Maine. “If there’s a tax cut, we think it should benefit the middle class, and from the numbers we’ve seen this disproportionately benefits the upper classes,” said Maine’s speaker of the House, Mark W. Eves, a Democrat. Under the LePage plan, low-income families would receive a credit ranging from $250 to $500 to help mitigate their increased burden.
Governor Sandoval, in laying out his tax increase plan to the Nevada Legislature, said he expected it to face opposition, but argued that the state needed to do something to improve its education system. “What we must all agree on is that another generation of young Nevadans cannot move through our schools without more resources, choice and reform — and that we must modernize our revenue system,” he told lawmakers.
If Republicans were distressed by Governor Sandoval’s speech, Democrats were nothing short of ecstatic. “I never thought I’d see the day when a Republican governor was proposing all the things we’ve been proposing for the last 20 years,” said State Senator Moises Denis, a Democrat from Las Vegas.
A version of this article appears in print on January 25, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: G.O.P. Governors Buck Party Line on Raising Taxes. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
