Friday, April 5, 2019

State "Windfall" tax revenue should go back into our pockets (mostly corporate pockets)?

Republicans have successfully sold the public on the weird concept that a state's surplus general revenue is an example of over taxation. And they always want to give it back, as if everything is paid for, replaced, and updated for the next generation.

Remember: Just when the country was about to balance its budget (without a constitutional amendment), and start paying down the national debt, George W. Bush gave all that "surplus" tax revenue back, and we're now $22 trillion in the hole. 

Here's what I mean; Kansas Republicans want all that extra state revenue, what they call a "windfall," to go "back in (our) pocket." Not into their starving underfunded schools and health care...

How does this make fiscal sense to anyone?
AP: Top Republican lawmakers in Kansas struggled to find enough GOP votes to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's veto of a tax relief bill. The bill was designed to prevent individuals and businesses from paying more in state income taxes ... allowing them to keep itemizing even if they don't on their federal returns. Changes in federal tax laws raised money for Kansas, in part by discouraging individual filers from claiming itemized deductions.

Kelly framed the bill as a return to a tax-cutting experiment under former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback that made Kansas nationally notorious because of the persistent budget woes that followed.
Freeloader Republican Message Crazy:
Republican leaders made it their top priority this year and argue that failing to return the revenue "windfall" represents an unlegislated tax increase. GOP State Chairman Mike Kuckelman and Secretary Emily Wellman issued statements Wednesday calling for a veto override.

"As a taxpayer, I might not even understand that Kansas took additional taxes from me that was intended to go in my pocket," Kuckelman said during a telephone interview. 

GOP holdout State Sen. John Skubal, a moderate Republican, said he was elected in his Kansas City-area district in 2016 to help "fix' state government. "To do that, we have to have some money," he said.
Ya think? And the lamebrained cost of the Republican bill, and more amazingly, who would get it?
Kelly's administration estimated that the bill would have cost the state $209 million during the budget year beginning in July, undercutting her plans to boost spending on public schools and expand Medicaid health coverage for the needy. Much of the taxpayer savings would have gone to corporations, particularly those with operations outside the U.S.

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