the “great plan” tax reform bill failed today in the house, and the legislator i interviewed said it’s unlikely it will be brought back up again this year. crossover day is tuesday, and after that time the house can only vote on bills passed by the senate and vice versa. considering the legislature is not in session tomorrow or friday, i think it’s safe to say this bill will not be coming back up for at least another year.
the bill was revised again last night, so i was thrown for a loop today when i arrived at work to discover that the new house bill had been incorporated into a senate resolution. the new bill would have capped property assessments, allowing residential property taxes to increase by only 2 percent a year and business taxes to increase by only 3 percent. it also would have eliminated car taxes.
again, on the surface it looks great. but then, you have the accompanying legislation that would take on extra sales taxes. it’s interesting how that bill was never mentioned on the house floor today (we watched live online since as soon as we got it up and running they announced our bill). but, that money has to be made up somewhere. in fact, that was one of the “softball” questions the speaker of the house was asked today while introducing his bill.
“how will the local governments and school systems be reimbursed?”
“the state.”
and that was that. apparently, the legislator asking the question thought that was a sufficient response. my coworkers and i, however, did not. it was one of the questions i asked our local legislator tonight. i bet you can’t guess his response.
“how will the $1 billion saved in car taxes be made up to the local governments?”
“through the state.”
(haven’t i heard this before?)
“so where is that money going to *come* from?”
“the state.”
so what you’re telling me is that the state has $1 billion in its reserves to reimburse the local governments? in that case, why not just go ahead and cut taxes and forget increasing the sales tax?
at any rate, it looks like we won’t have to be moving to tennessee any time soon.
In all seriousness, what type of employer do you have? By that I mean, are they liberal? Conservative? I’m just wondering how in depth they’ll allow you to grill these weak-sucks who are dispensing non-sense like samples at Costco. I’d totally challenge the guy, but then, this might be why I didn’t pursue a career in journalism-I’d get fired for being too hyped up. LOL.