Skip to main content

If Delaware became like Idaho...

... as much as I hate to admit it, we'd have closed the largest part of our State budget deficit.

Kilroy (damn his hide) got me thinking about this, with his proposal that a State sales tax be used to fund education.

I agree with the commenter that it would take one hell of a lot more balls than anybody in the General Assembly has to even propose such a consumption tax.

Besides, we'd have to repaint that Home of Tax-free Shopping sign.

But, for kicks and grins, I asked myself what would happen if the State just raised the Gross Receipts Tax, which is functionally a hidden sales tax.

If you have to have taxes at all, I like consumption taxes, because (a) I can choose not to consume; and (b) if we're going to take money from people at gunpoint, it might as well include all those tourists at the Beach who won't leave me a parking space.

But it turns out to be quite a lot of fun to discover what kind of revenue the State is actually collecting from the GRT (which is currently topped out just below 2%).

According to the Tax Foundation, Delaware ranks 49th out of 50 in sales/GRT tax receipts. Per capita, Delaware collects on $520 annually.

Should Delaware essentially double the GRT, bringing it up to 43rd in the nation (right around Idaho), my back of the matchbook calculation suggests it would bring in something on the order of $400 million in new revenue.

Probably half that money would be collected around Dover Downs on race weekends or outside Gus N Gus Hamburgers on the boardwalk, from people who don't live here.

Now I'd reduce that income forecast by 25% just to allow for the Recession itself and a negative impact on business revenues.

But the question of the day is: how much less a disaster would a $300 million shortfall be than a $600 million shortfall?

Besides, we could still keep lying to the tourists and telling them we have no sales tax.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...