Wednesday, April 3, 2002
|
Wednesday, April 3, 2002 |
|
It's past time to just say no to higher local sales taxes You don't know whether to laugh or to cry. My inclination was to laugh, of course, when I read in the AJC (March 27) that the Georgia House had voted 94-25 to permit Fulton and DeKalb Counties to hold referendums for a 1 percent sales tax increase to pay for sewer improvements. There's no denying the importance of sewers that work right. It's a worthy cause. The beauty of seeing DeKalb and Fulton Counties with an 8 percent sales tax is that all manners of people from other counties would come into these two tourist meccas and pay this tax. (Don't even think they'd be throwing their money down the sewer!) Moreover, the people of DeKalb and Fulton have just proven, on March 19, that they love SPLOST, by approving a 5-year extension for their existing SPLOST. So why not give them the opportunity to prove their undying love once again? Perhaps there's a good alternative for people who love SPLOST. That would be moving to Canada where the sales tax is 15 percent. They would skip all the intermediate steps, and for people with school children who love snow, it could be wonderful. A few words of caution, though, about Canada. Schools don't close out there when it snows: they just plow the roads and kids have to go to school. That takes a bit of the fun out of it, but education is a worthy cause there too. The Canadians also like to brag about their free health care. Here's what so interesting about the free health care Canadians get from their 15 percent sales tax (plus much higher income and property taxes than we have). (1) A lot of their doctors feel overregulated and underpaid and try to move to the U.S. (2) The hospital nurses feel overworked and underpaid too, so they frequently go on strike. Elective surgery takes on a whole new meaning when it's at the nurses' election, not yours. (3) It may be six months between the time you get sick and the time you can get a doctor's appointment, so there's a good chance your problem will go away in the meantime, one way or another. Some Canadians smartly come to the U.S. to get treated (but not free). The Georgia House of Representatives has 180 members, of whom 74 are Republicans. With only 25 votes against allowing an 8 percent sales tax, you can see what kind of Republicans we have there. Our best defense against extravagant taxes is electing people who oppose extravagant spending. People like that would not put needless temptations in the form of SPLOST special elections in front of people too weak to resist the lure of goodies like sewers, stadiums, trees, parks, roads, sidewalks, bike trails, pools, etc. In varying degrees we may need all these things, but we're already paying taxes for all these things too, and some things are more intelligently financed through bonds (for reasons I have explained many times before, having to do with making the users also the payers). It's time for us citizens to draw the line. So far as I am concerned, the existing 5 percent rate is where I draw the line, and I am not even happy about that because our current 1 percent LOST tax in Fayette County is squandered through an inequitable, even dumb, formula, for the benefit of large businesses and our wealthier city residents. In August of this year, our local elected officials will be looking at a new formula to divide this LOST pie within the county, and the right thing to do would actually be to drop the LOST altogether. It'll be interesting to see who's got the guts to propose that. Claude Y. Paquin Fayetteville cypaquin@msn.com
|
||