The think tank/blog The Nerve has a shabby, ill-explained, ill-sourced item up lauding some SC majority party legislators for trying to cut the sales tax. The popular exemptions are detailed. The ones to be eliminated- which is where the fight will be- are mentioned in passing. There's a feelgood throwaway about this being some sort of poor women's tax relief act, but no link to the bill so readers can get into the details of the thing (cable? internet? cell or landline phone service, clothes?):
The bill (H. 4271), filed May 25 by Rep. Shannon Erickson, R-Beaufort, and co-sponsored by six other Republican representatives, would reduce the sales tax to 3.85 percent from 6 percent.
The bill would do away with a myriad of sales tax exemptions, though it would leave intact existing breaks on groceries, prescription medicine, durable medical equipment and utility bills, Erickson said Monday.
“I believe we would see businesses coming to South Carolina with the idea that everyone is on the same playing field,” Erickson told The Nerve when asked about the effect of her bill should it become law. “Our goal here is to focus a discussion on at least one piece of the (tax) code.”
Erickson said she and the bill’s co-sponsors, who she pointed out are all women, collectively decided to keep groceries, medicine and utility bills exempt from sales taxes because poor residents typically pay a larger percentage of their income on those items.
“We decided to put out a bill to safeguard what South Carolinians spend most of their budget on,” she said.This is another of the endless series of Field of Dreams tax bills the SCGOP keeps throwing up, arguing that if we strip state government of as much funding as possible, business will pick this state over places like Alabama and Mississippi, which have practiced the art of being backward for generations.
Why will "unprepared" food be exempt and "prepared" food won't, for example? Why limit it to things you can buy with food stamps?
Here's the text of the bill. Pick around and see who they're planning to choose as winners and losers.
It's a big con.
The article didn't laud the bill, it simply reported on it. Obviously, as individuals familiar with the S.C. Policy Council and The Nerve know, the organization is a proponent of simplfying the state tax code. However, that doesn't mean we support or don't support this particular piece of legislation.
ReplyDeleteThere have been a number of bills that we've written about on The Nerve because we've thought they were interesting, but that didn't mean we thought they would have been good legislation.
You are right that it would have been good to have had a link to the bill so readers could have read it for themselves, however.