Saving it up
In August of 2006, Tennessee will have a sales tax holiday. This will be that special time of year where, for an entire weekend, the powers that be acknowledge that sales taxes in Tennessee are ridiculously high and people need a break. If you buy a car during the holiday, you could save a few thousand bucks.
I, of course, advocate buying some guns. But they won’t be exempt because, as with most tax benefit schemes, those without children in school will probably get screwed:
Tax-free items will include clothes and school supplies costing $100 or less, and computers costing $1500 or less. The sales tax holiday does not include software, fashion accessories or sports equipment.
Guess that means no cars, too.
June 16th, 2005 at 10:27 am
Isn’t a gun a school accessory?
I mean, the Commie Mommies keep telling me the only purpose to own one is to use it in a school massacre.
June 16th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Of course, sales taxes in Tennessee are “ridiculously high” because there is no income tax, but hey…
June 16th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
But then we’d eventually have both and they would both soon be ridiculously high.
June 16th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
EFZ
June 16th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
Huh?
June 16th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
How do you propose we pay for stuff?
June 16th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
By cutting other stuff we shouldn’t be paying for.
June 16th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
Apologies. EFZ stands for Ed F*cking Zachery.
Hard to convince anyone an income tax is necessary so long as the populace in TN doesn’t trust their legislature.
June 16th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
Specifics, please. Top three (and how much this would save) would be fine.
June 16th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
Without getting into unfucking TennCare, here’s some:
Getting out of the bond business would save $500M per year
145M labelled ‘Miscellaneous’ (i.e., pork)
And we can cut the excess spent on roads in our state quite a bit.
Of course, all the numbers are in govmath so they’re quite likely useless measures.
June 17th, 2005 at 2:23 am
Getting out of the bond business would save $500M per year
you mean asking politicians to spend less than or equal to what comes in? perish the thought.
My problem with most small government types (and your largely an exception, though not completely) is that they tend to favour a lot of things which are pretty expensive. Things like the war, military spending, death penalty, 3 strikes and other get tough on crime measures, war on drugs, etc.
June 17th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
When did they kill the cap on sales taxes, i.e., maximum tax for one item? I bought a Jeep 9 years ago and only the first $10,000 or so was taxed.
June 17th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Guy, dunno when but it seems that it’s a max of like $1800 in sales tax then there’s a break until you get to a higher value or some such arbitrary measure.
June 17th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
OK, Uncle, let’s assume that you eliminated those things completely. Congratulations! You’ve just dropped the state income tax from 7% to 6.724%! Wow!
(Never mind the fact that if they stopped issuing bonds, they would just increase taxes to make up for it…)
June 20th, 2005 at 8:30 am
So, are you arguing that because the impact is tiny that we shouldn’t demand that the .gov act in a fiscally responsible way?
the problem is that the .gov is involved in so many things that any one thing (except maybe TennCare) likely won’t have a huge impact. And I’m all for getting them out stuff, even if it’s small stuff, one thing at a time.