Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to take the dramatic step of abolishing the state income tax on individuals and corporations, offsetting the revenue loss by raising sales taxes by 3 percentage points. That would push the total tax rate in New Orleans to 12 percent, raising concerns that his plan will shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Low-income people pay a higher proportion of their incomes in sales taxes. “We’d merely be shuffling the way we pay taxes,” said James Richardson, a Louisiana State University professor. “Higher sales taxes would make the system more regressive.”
I realize Bobby Jindal is running for President. In fact he has been doing this for.. well.. his whole life but he's certainly put his term as Governor to use showcasing his ideological bona fides and buttering up politically useful cronies instead of, you know, governing Louisiana.
It's become so ridiculous, in fact, that I am beginning to entertain the idea that "Bobby Jindal" (already we know not his given name) isn't an actual person so much as a piece of performance art about the most evil, phony, and all around worst thing a politician could possibly be if he really committed to it. Just contemplating the totality of awfulness can be exhausting. Luckily, a lot of the time, we can just let Lamar do the heavy lifting there.
This is one of the worst things he's done:
ReplyDeletehttp://theadvocate.com/home/4827985-125/womens-shelters-likely-to-cut
Also, he just cut UNO by another million. They now receive less than half the money they did under Blanco.
Even worse: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/01/jindal_tax_plan_could_eliminat.html
ReplyDeleteJindal proposes to eliminate severance taxes on minerals. The main tax on the erl industry. Wow.
It's quite a juxtaposition with Foster Campbell's 2007 proposal to repeal the income tax and replace it, not with a sales tax, but with a new fee on oil and gas. http://www.nola.com/elections/index.ssf/2007/09/foster_campbell_proud_to_be_ca.html
ReplyDeleteFoster wasn't taken seriously, of course. So we have to conclude that the default preference is for taxing poor people before taxing oil companies.