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Food taxes
Posted by: McQ on Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Being a libertarian, I'm not a fan of any taxes, but I'm especially put off by taxes on food. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a worse way to hurt the poor in this country than taxation on food.

Now I recognize that taxes on food are usually state and local taxes. But given that Democrats are always claiming they want to do things to help the poor and Republicans are always claiming they want to cut taxes, it would seem to be the one tax they both could agree should be eliminated.

Yet in Mississippi, you have a Republican governor in probably the poorest state in the union that thinks one of the highest taxes on food (7%) is fine and dandy:

Up at the stately domed Mississippi Capitol, Gov. Haley Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist, has other ideas. Studies, polls, protests at the Capitol, legislative sentiment and America’s highest cardiovascular disease rate notwithstanding, the governor of the poorest state is not budging, for the second year in a row: no cut in the 7 percent grocery tax and no increase in the 18-cents-a-pack third-lowest-in-the-nation, cigarette tax.

Now let's be clear. I am not advocating an increase in the cigarette tax to offset the food tax. I would never encourage or approve of a sin tax. And that is the argument going on in Mississippi right now.

However that doesn't change my opposition to taxing food. Removing the food tax would immediately go the the bottom line of the finances of poor people. It's an immediate 7% more they can spend on food. Where are Mississippi's Democrats on this? Where are the tax-cutting Mississippi Republicans?

Of course, when you do things like this ...

He pushed through the Legislature hundreds of millions in subsidies for the plant, for Toyota S.U.V.s, three days after announcing it.

...you're less inclined to take care of the poorer folks in your state by exempting food from taxation. That is if your priority is revenue and not the best interests of your citizens.

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Oh, come on .. tax the hell out of tobacco .. till the market dies.

I find it absolutely digusting that with the infamous "Tobacco Settlement" that the states are now equal co-conspirators with the tobacco companies to injury the health of citizens to fund virtually everything except the end of tobacco.

If Delany was good enough to kill off DDT, it should be good enough to kill tobacco.

Written By: Neo
URL: http://

I didn’t know that any state in the union was barbaric enough to employ a grocery tax. Is there any surer way to keep the poor poor?

Written By: pangloss
URL: http://

I find it absolutely digusting that with the infamous "Tobacco Settlement" that the states are now equal co-conspirators with the tobacco companies to injury the health of citizens to fund virtually everything except the end of tobacco.

I must have missed it where people are being forced to smoke.

Written By: Jordan
URL: http://

I must have missed it where people are being forced to smoke.

So close to the heart of the issue! The fact is no one was being forced to smoke, and yet the states shook down cigarette companies to force them to pay for the medical care and other effects of people smoking.

Written By: steverino
URL: http://steverino.journalspace.com/

The real winners in this fiasco are the lawyers who made off with millions in legal fees. The real intent has been expressed by government officials who have said they want to make tobacco illegal in ten years. Don’t they ever learn.

Prohibition gave a bunch of small time hoods who were shaking down their neighborhoods the financial resources to become the Mafia.

The war on drugs did the same for the Bloods and the Crips.

Now Government is turning it’s big guns on tobacco. What group of hoodlums will this bring to power?

Written By: James E. Fish
URL: http://

Being a libertarian

No, McQ. You are not a libertarian. Your support for the war and America’s militarist policy is anti-libertarian. Our foreign policy assures big government.

That said, you are right on the issue of taxing food.

Written By: Scott Erb
URL: http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/~erb/blog.htm

The same thing is going on here in Tennessee. Republicans want to end the food tax and the Democrats, the party of the little guy, opposes it. It just goes to show that modern liberals care more about government much more than they do about helping the poor.

http://glendean.blogspot.com/2007/02/bredesen-and-democrats-dont-give-rats.html

Written By: Glen Dean
URL: http://glendean.typepad.com/christianlibertarian

Scott -

No, McQ. You are not a libertarian. Your support for the war and America’s militarist policy is anti-libertarian. Our foreign policy assures big government.

Try again. Choosing to fight a war rather than avoid it, in the big scheme of things, can potentially lower net coercion against the American people, which would make use of the military a fairly libertarian (as opposed to anarchist) policy. Don’t forget that it’s the superior application of organized violence that carved out all this territory, this jurisdiction in which yet more organized force is used to protect rights (quite imperfectly, granted, but neolibertarians are pushing for change on that front too).

The U.S. government, after all, is not the only source of coercion or fraud used against Americans. Having a foreign policy does not make one less libertarian.

The welfare state, on the other hand, which makes up a larger share of the budget than the entire military apparatus, is pure coercion for the intended purposes of redistributing the loot within the country. Creeping nannyism ensures big government.

Now, we can argue about which policies are smarter for preserving liberty, but don’t go saying McQ isn’t libertarian simply because he has a different view of what means are best for attaining the preferred end of greater liberty. You have to prove his means don’t obtain the intended results, rather than simply asserting it.

Written By: Bryan Pick
URL: http://www.qando.net

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