It’s That Doofus Glenn Hegar Again, Y’all
I have introduced you guys to Glenn Hegar before. He is currently my state senator and now he wants to be Texas Comptroller.
Needless to say, he thinks there’s some magical way to run government without taxes. He thinks Texas taxes are too damn high. Now, I wonder which political party has been in charge of Texas for the past 20 years who made those taxes so damn high? Glenn? Speak up, son. I can’t hear you.
Anyway, Texas does not have an income tax. We have a property tax. It ain’t perfect but it sure beats Glenn’s idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uxajOx1ZqY
Yeah, he wants a sales tax. No matter how you do the math, we’d have to have a 20% tax on everything for this to work out.
Now that don’t bother Grandpa Tea Party. Hell, he and Grandma still have the same gold brocade couch they bought in 1968 with the plastic cover that makes farting sounds when you sit down. He wears the same suit he bought in 1973 and his tools are from Sears and Roebuck’s so they are guaranteed for his lifetime. He’s gonna drive his truck to the funeral home and be buried in the family plot that was paid for by his mother right after WWII.
A Glamour Shot of Glenn Hegar
No, the only people hurt by a sales tax are the people who can least afford it – young families raising children.
Also, a sales tax does diddle squat to fire up the economy, and, remember, it’s only a two hour drive to Louisiana, Oklahoma, or New Mexico to buy big ticket items.
So, when you call this a dumb idea, it’s only because you can’t spell draconian.
So, we’re talking about mean old people who only tip the waiter a dollar getting all gleeful over a 20% sales tax on everything. Somebody needs to tell Grandpa that we’re slapping a 20% tax on Metamucil and see how long it takes him to start whining.
We’re talking about making a doofus the comptroller of the State of Texas. The boy can’t add or subtract, but by gawd he can shoot a gun and demean women. What else do you need?
I’m damned if I can figure out what his 2nd Amendment ads were all about considering he’s running for the job of bookkeeper.
1This is also a jab at renters. You know that rent will not go down when a property tax goes away. Rent never goes down. So shifting to a sales tax will double the effective tax rate for renters.
I have to admire the Republican ability to back-stab so many middle class people with only one knife.
2Young generation needs to be educated. Ain’t they nobuddy where he lives who can add, subtract, multiply, and oh I forgot that other word. And someone else oughta remind him that if, God forbid, he actually wins, when he gets to his new office, the secretary is gonna sit down and explain how things work and he’s gonna have a red face.
Ralph, I haven’t rented in a long time. Does rent have sales tax?
3Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a Republican Texas state senator; but I repeat myself.
4Marge, Rent does not have sales tax, but rent is set to cover the landlord’s property tax. So when property tax goes down, landlords have a windfall profit but the renters never see a dime of it. Meanwhile the shift from property tax to sales tax increases the burden on the renter because they are still paying rental rates based on the landlord’s property tax plus the higher sales tax.
Landlords get a windfall and renters get &^%*$^%#@.
How Republican can you get?
5I will never forget Bill Clinton at the National Democratic convention yelling “Arithmetic!” Apparently for REthugs, that is a four letter word!
6@Ralph: Thinking about what you said about back stabbing… Used to be in the Dark Ages that Church and State were the two most powerful money gathering machines and the peons/slaves were the targets. It seems that the US is trying a new twist.
Combine both Church and State money gathering powers into corporations.
Citizens United, Hobby Lobby-corporate personhood, republicans & their ilk creating more and more laws in favor of corporations/oligarchs and placing the rest at a disadvantage.
7When I moved from Pennsyltucky to Texas in 1999 the PA Income tax was about 2% and the sales tax was around 4% so I figured to going to Texas with its 6% sales tax would be about a wash. And it would have too, if it weren’t for all the various municipalities that add their own sales taxes which raised the effective rate to over 7% when I got anything at Lowes Depot.
8Hegar the Horrible.
9Don A, its the same way in Alabammy. They have literally nothing to brag about.
10Another bad idea that comes up often is a “flat tax”. All economic models of which I’ve seen show that it would devastate the home building and mortgage lending business, deeply harm charitable giving, and have to be above 30% just to provide our current amount of revenue for the government to continue operating.
11Wow, he deflected actually sharing what the sales taxes would have to be well–start to answer and then pretend you have a tangent to provide and never answer the question. Because if he actually provided the amount needed to use sales tax (which already exists) to compensate for loss of property tax revenue then people would be outraged at the amount needed!
12This same proposal has been partially implemented in Kansas by Gov. Sam Brownback and in Missouri it has been passed by our Republican led legislature but vetoed by our sensible Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon. Missouri boarders seven different states so it shouldn’t take a CPA to do the math on this one, but apparently it does, or it would if Republicans cared about such things as arithmetic and well public education which such proposals damage.
This is a Koch Brothers initiative and Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Bobby Jindal and their cronies are all over it!
13One more thing, proposals such as this and the flat tax ( IMHO, Atticus you are dead on about this), ignore the nonlinearity of money. That is, it’s disproportionately harder to survive, the further you are below the subsistence level and the further above the subsistence level you are the faster your money aggregates (due to additional opportunity). In English that translates to: the more money you have the easier it is to make additional money.
It all comes down fairness, and I think questions of fairness, though somewhat arbitrary, are important. For example, which is fairer, democracy or plutocracy? That is a matter of opinion but it is an opinion that over time has become a majority opinion. It is simply not fair to the poor, children, and the elderly living on fixed incomes to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden.
All too often Republicans speak of getting the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as if doing so was the moral equivalent of moving up from JV to Varsity (which it may have been for them), when in reality the kind of effort it actually takes is Herculean, the difference between playing T-Ball and starting in The Majors. Changes like this make it even more challenging – think starting in the final game of the World Series.
14Something about that Glamour Shot sets off my Youth Minister radar.
15This man’s brilliant. No income tax, no property tax, just a sales tax… in the Internet Age, which some millions of people use to bolster their buying-power, because if they order on-line from out-of-state, they don’t have to pay sales taxes? “So let’s bump up the sales tax!” Even the most heartless voters can see (surely?) how dumb this is. For themselves. Or for the State’s coffers. Never MIND poor people!
16He is such an embarrassment! Doofus is really being charitable.
17As someone who sells furniture and mattresses, this scares the hell out of me. The only ones that will make money are those companies that sell the same items on-line. This is after they have come to the store, spent an hour with me asking all kinds of questions, and then have the gall to say, “thanks, I am buying it on-line cause I save on the tax.” I actually had one man then finish it by saying he was doing this cause he didn’t like to pay taxes. I said well, we have to pay cops and firemen something! !@#$%%%
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