Georgia should not give Savannah to South Carolina in exchange for North Augusta!
Nathan Deal should not swap the governor's mansion for a condo in Midtown!
And Republicans should not raise taxes on 80 percent of Georgians! Or cut the state budget by one-fourth!
Two of these scenarios are crudely contrived piffle, and two of them are in a new “study” by a local left-wing think tank. But I repeat myself.
With its new study, the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute wants you to believe Republicans plan a giant shift of the tax burden from "the rich" to the middle class and working poor. That no one has proposed doing anything of the sort appears irrelevant to GBPI.
You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. GBPI warns “tax shift legislation” is already “under discussion in Georgia.” The study cites a trio of bills introduced in the spring which mention income and sales taxes, and outlines three “potential tax shift options available to state lawmakers.”
All three options would lead to results these tax-and-spend liberals find deplorable. This is unsurprising, given that the options seem to have been concocted for that very purpose.
In fact, neither GBPI nor anyone else could design a “tax shift option” that was honestly based on the three bills. Two of them don’t even call for changing the income or sales-tax rates.
The third, HB 688, calls for abolishing the income tax and setting the sales tax rate at an undetermined level. GBPI asserts the bill’s drafters “have suggested the new state rate needs to be between 7 percent and 8.8 percent and that reform would likely include taxing groceries” (the news story GBPI cited for that claim includes no such details).
So, did GBPI base any of its “tax shift” options on said suggestion? Of course not.
Instead, one option is based on the notion the state would end the income tax and start taxing groceries as well as prescription drugs, while raising the average combined local and state sales-tax rate to a staggering 13.5 percent. For comparison, the highest average combined rate in the rest of the country is 9.43 percent in Tennessee.
GBPI’s other options are just as egregious in their departure from the “discussion in Georgia.” Conveniently, all three manage to arrive at the same conclusion: Four in five Georgians would pay more in taxes while “the rich” reaped a windfall.
Either that, or the rich would still get richer — while Republicans who have boosted the state’s budget by more than $2 billion over the past three years would suddenly turn around and slash it by $2.4 billion (“more than Georgia’s entire yearly budget for higher education,” GBPI notes) to $4.8 billion (“nearly as much as Georgia spends on health care and higher education combined”).
This may be how delusional left-wingers think conservatives think, but it's far removed from reality. The last big tax-reform effort, in 2011, died because analysts couldn't guarantee zero Georgians would see a tax increase and because it might have produced a shortfall of $300 million.
One of HB 688’s co-sponsors, Rep. Edward Lindsey, R-Atlanta, describes that bill as merely “a beginning point of discussion” about tax reform.
The GBPI study is intended as something rather different: not a contribution to the debate, but an attempt to keep us from having one.
