When in doubt, jack up the sales tax (’cause our rich friends won’t care)
Over at the General Assembly, there’s a deal on tap — or so we read — to raise about $1 billion in new taxes and finish up the state budget. The key ingredient? One guess … and if you say making the income tax more progressive, or broadening the sales tax base to include services that the wealthy buy, you clearly don’t know your pro-bidness Democrats well enough.
No, the answer is a flat-out, 1 percent increase in the existing sales tax, which tax — as every good progressive knows — hits low-income folks way harder than it does the rich. In a statement, the N.C,. Justice Center’s Elaine Mejia very politely calls out “the highly regressive nature of the main component of the plan” and pleads with legislators to make the overall package just a wee bit less regressive before they wrap things up.
Mejia is the highly respected director of the Justice Center’s budget & tax center. And as always, she makes good sense. It’ll be interesting to see whether the supposedly more progressive House Democrats (including such Triangle worthies as Paul Luebke and Jennifer Weiss, chairs of the House Finance Committee, not to mention Speaker Joe Hackney and his chief budget negotiator Mickey Michaux) will swallow this Senate-initiated package whole or spit out some parts of it as simply indigestible.
Mejia’s statement is below.
