On Friday, Americans for Tax Reform sent out a release, claiming that gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker wrote a letter to the editor in 2004 calling for a statewide income tax. Shortly after the release, Bill Walker’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to ATR, claiming that Walker did not write the letter and that there were at least 20 Bill Walker’s in the state that could have done so.

Now it appears that Bill Walker who wrote the letter has stepped forward. This Bill Walker has a blog and builds boats and wants some credit for his letter, which was supposed to be a satire, but satire in newspaper land is hard pull off:

Here’s what the real writer of the letter wrote on his blog:

I found the idea of both permanent fund dividends and a state income tax to be such an absurd idea that I wrote a satire proposing it. Mine was originally titled “A Modest Proposal” after Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire where Swift proposes the absurd idea of the impoverished Irish selling their babies as food for the rich. Unfortunately, ADN replaced my title with their own. However, ADN did leave my reference to “A Modest Proposal” in the text.

No response yet from ATR.