Georgia Legislature’s final days dominate the AJC Truth-O-Meter

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Our goal is to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution fact-check statements by local, state and national political leaders, including lobbyists and interest groups. We then rate them on the AJC Truth-O-Meter.

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The fact check then moves on to a panel of veteran editors who debate the statement and the reporter’s recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling. The panel votes on a final ruling; majority prevails.

Craft beer. The school sales tax holiday. Delta’s tax break. And solar energy.

They all appeared on the fact-checking radar of PolitiFact and PolitiFact Georgia last week in the harried final days of the 2015 Georgia General Assembly.

The school sales tax holiday and Delta’s longstanding tax break were on the table as lawmakers passed and sent to the governor a transportation spending bill that was the session’s No. 1 priority. We looked at Delta’s claim that Georgia already has one of the nation’s highest jet fuel taxes, and the Georgia Retail Association’s contention that tax holidays spark more economic activity.

We looked at a claim that changing state law to allow brew pubs to sell “to-go” beer might start Georgia on a slippery slope to becoming another Mexico. We also checked whether recent solar energy policies in Georgia have resulted in rate hikes.

Abbreviated versions of our fact-checks can be found below. Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com/georgia/

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Martin Smith on Monday, March 23rd, 2015 in a subcommittee hearing

By allowing brew pubs to sell beer, Georgia could become like Mexico with only a couple of manufacturers controlling all aspects of market.

Craft beer breweries and brew pub owners were fighting down-to-the-wire in the Georgia General Assembly this year for the right to send beer home with their patrons. During a subcommittee hearing in which to-go sales by brew pubs were being discussed, Martin Smith, lobbyist for the Georgia Beer Wholesalers Association, warned against lawmakers against starting down a slippery slope that could lead to giant conglomerates dominating the market.

“When you allow producers to have access and allow retail, you allow that slide into what happens in the rest of the world where large producers own everything,” Smith testified. “In Mexico, 90 percent of the market is controlled by one entity. It allows the manufacturer to own the retail.”

Mexico’s beer market has been widely criticized as being controlled by basically two companies.

Bart Watson, chief economist for the Colorado-based Brewers Association, the craft brewers trade association, called the Mexico argument “a red herring.”

All states that allow brew pub to-go sales have limits on production, sales or both — making dominance of the market virtually impossible, Watson said.

The same was true in Georgia’s proposed law, he said.

“The NBWA’s opposition to these laws by comparing them to what has happened in Mexico is nonsensical,” Watson said.

We rated Smith’s statement as False.

Rick McAllister on Friday, March 27th, 2015 in a news report

People buy more items during Georgia’s sales-tax holidays, boosting economic activity.

The president of the Georgia Retail Federation recently wrote an editorial that warned against eliminating the state’s popular sales tax holidays on school supplies and energy-efficient appliances.

An association-funded study showed that “consumers often used the additional savings from their tax-free purchases to buy additional items,” Rick McAllister wrote in the Savannah Morning News.

That in turn creates demand for additional workers, he added, either hired as temporary labor or paid through increased overtime.

“We recognize the value these sales tax holidays have in saving families money while also producing needed jobs,” McAllister wrote.

Lawmakers looked at eliminating the sales tax holidays as part of their push to raise $1 billion annually for transportation. Eliminating the two-day school sales tax holiday would save about $20 million annually, estimates show.

It’s true that the breaks are popular with shoppers, who do respond to the sales.

But the overwhelming evidence is that people are buying what they would need with or without the break.

We rated McAllister’s claim Half True.

Trebor Banstetter on Sunday, March 1st, 2015 in a newspaper article

Georgia has one of the nation’s highest jet fuel taxes.

Delta officials spent most of the 2015 legislative session lobbying to preserve a jet fuel tax exemption first granted the airline in 2005, at the height of its financial struggles.

Among their arguments against reinstating the tax is that Georgia already has one of the nation’s highest jet fuel taxes.

The right-leaning Tax Foundation ranked states for jet fuel taxes in June 2014 based on data from Airlines for America, the airlines trade association The foundation found Georgia was 11th nationally at 15 cents, based on its combined effective jet fuel tax rate and fees per gallon.

Three states — Texas, Ohio and Delaware — had no jet fuel taxes. No 1 rated Illinois charges 32.8 cents, more than twice Georgia’s taxes and fees, followed by California with 27 cents and Connecticut with 26.4 cents.

We found no indication that the jet fuel tax was hurting business at the nation’s two busiest airports, located in No. 11 Georgia and No. 1 rated Illinois. That bit of missing context takes this one down a note on the Truth-0-Meter.

We rated Banstetter’s statement Mostly True.

Americans for Prosperity: Florida on Tuesday, March 10th, 2015 in a news release

Recent solar energy policies in Georgia “have resulted in rate hikes and did not result in solar becoming any more economically viable.”

A group backed by the Koch brothers is arguing a proposed constitutional amendment that would change Florida solar energy regulations will lead the Sunshine State down a dark path.

Americans For Prosperity Florida says a petition being circulated by solar advocates Floridians for Solar Choice is the wrong move for the state and will result in higher costs and decreased competition.

At a March 10, 2015, news conference, AFP members said the amendment was misguided. They backed up their point of view by implying Georgia’s solar policies are “burdensome and expensive government mandates” that shouldn’t be emulated, and cited a Louisiana study that solar power would be very expensive to implement.

AFP Florida followed up the conference with a release that read, “In Georgia, similar net metering policies have resulted in rate hikes and did not result in solar becoming any more economically viable.”

AFP Florida admitted it meant to say Louisiana, which is having its own debate on the issue. The program in Georgia is thriving. Solar power use in Georgia wasn’t supposed to affect rates, and it hasn’t the state’s largest utility said. Louisiana did see a rate increase, but it doesn’t seem to be specifically related to a solar initiative.

The statement is completely wrong.

We rated it Pants on Fire.