Perzel's senior moment

LIKE A BAD PENNY, a crazy scheme of Rep. John Perzel to limit the property-tax relief that was to come from gaming revenues to a certain group of senior citizens keeps turning up.

Today, Perzel is due to hold a news conference to press the Legislature to get his bill out of committee and up for a vote.

Perzel wants the bulk of the $1.3 billion projected from gaming revenues to let seniors 65 years and older who make under $40,000 a year - there are 630,000 of them - skip the part of their property tax that funds education. Perzel's office estimates that would represent a tax break of $2,000 per household.

He says he wants to give relief to seniors on fixed incomes, and believes it's a wiser move than giving smaller tax cuts of about $300 to the 2.7 million families in the Commonwealth under the original gaming act.

Early last year, he called the idea of trying to help everyone, instead of a select few, as nonsense, saying, "the communists tried it and it didn't work."

He seems to have forgotten that he's an elected lawmaker in a democracy. And he, along with other elected lawmakers in the state, were the ones rationalizing the sleight-of-hand that was the original gaming act as a move whose bitterness would somehow be sweetened by property-tax relief for all.

Not that we don't love seniors. But these days, we know few families who couldn't use the $300 that they are rightfully expecting in exchange for holding their noses on the gaming issue. *