With tax-paying deadline approaching, many folks are remembering how much they hate taxes.

That's, of course, when they are paying taxes. You don't hear folks complain when the taxes are being spent on their behalf.

Now, if citizens dislike taxes, what about politicians? They hate them too, but for different reasons. Elected officials don't like taxes because they know if they impose or raise them, they might no longer be an elected official.

But there is one area of taxation that lawmakers have come to love: tax credits.

Credits are a beautiful way to give with one hand while taking away with the other. And the political calculus of tax credits works out nicely as well. Here's why:

Most taxes apply to everyone, or at least to all in a particular class. Thus anger is generalized and easy to deflect.

But tax credits are aimed at specific targets or specific interests. And those interests tend to be extremely grateful, rewarding the credit-bestowing politician with support, financial help and hearty back slaps.

In short, tax credits are a way to allow the particular to escape the pain of the general. Just look at the lengthy page of excise tax credits already on the books to get an idea of how many people, projects and good works have earned an exemption from that tax we are all supposed to pay.

Generally speaking, the easiest way to get around a general excise tax is to ask for an exemption for a new industry. The theory here is that the industry wouldn't exist without the exemption, so nothing is lost.

Today, lawmakers are clucking their tongues about news (reported by The Advertiser's Andrew Gomes) that Ko Olina developer Jeff Stone has made partial use of $75 million in tax credits designed to stimulate the building of a huge new aquarium at the resort. Never mind that Stone said he no longer needed the credits and that lawmakers were busily searching for another place to "spend" the $75 million. Never mind also that the aquarium was never built and probably never will be.

Stone's claim for partial use of the credits ($3.45 million) was against money spent on preliminary work on the aquarium. So they might indeed qualify.

But the point here is that it is time for legislators to rethink the whole idea of excise tax credits. It is one thing to use credits to help a deserving group while hitting another (low-income tax credits, for instance). It is another to erode the basic idea of a tax with a Christmas-tree list of special, and often questionable, exemptions.

Jerry Burris' column appears Wednesdays in this space. See his blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com/akamaipolitics. Reach him at jrryburris@yahoo.com.