Can kickers
THE fiscal year 2023 budget bill passed by the House includes a provision that would increase the tobacco tax to $4.75 from $3.75, and impose an additional 15% tax on “tobacco substitute or chewable tobacco product or other smokable or snuffable substance, material or product, other than cigarettes.” The current rate is 60% of the invoice price. The House wants to increase it to 75%.
But there’s more. The House budget bill would also slap an additional tax rate of 2 cents per fluid ounce on sugar sweetened beverages.
Compelling arguments against such taxes have been made by many scholars and experts, as mentioned in our previous editorials; but politics, especially in an election year, is apparently immune to good reasoning in general and basic arithmetic in particular.
Consider, for example, the “logic” behind increasing taxes on tobacco and sweetened beverages. Such taxes would supposedly discourage members of the public from purchasing those products. At the same time, proponents say the tax hikes would increase revenue. There are still no eggs in sight, but the House has already counted the chickens. Citing the projection of Revenue and Taxation — as if it’s a forecast and not a “wishcast” — the tax hike proponents say they’re “looking at between $5 million and $7 million…for the fiscal year.” Raising taxes would mean higher prices but they expect absolutely no changes in the affected consumers’ buying habits.
The supposed beneficiary of the tax hikes is CHCC, the autonomous public corporation created by a 2009 law to be “as financially self-sufficient and independent of the Commonwealth Government as is possible.” CHCC, which is quite possibly CUC’s single biggest delinquent customer, also has to administer the government’s medical referral program which, as health officials have repeatedly stated, is woefully underfunded. “Normally, about 22% of our requested budget is appropriated,” a medical referral program official said over two years ago. “For example, if we requested $15 million, they will give us $2 million. So we are into deficit right away.”
Who can appropriate funding for the medical referral program? The Legislature. Here, by the way, is a Variety headline from 2012: “[Lawmaker] says he’ll find ways to stop overspending in medical referrals.”
To recap, the FY 2023 budget bill, now pending in the Senate, would make tobacco products and sweetened beverages more expensive which lawmakers hope would raise between $5 million and $7 million which they hope would go to CHCC which needs much more — so much more — than that amount.
Naturally, the House members thanked each other, profusely, for passing a “balanced” budget.
Unsolicited advice
THE power plant and the hospital are two entities that actually provide essential and badly needed services to the public. Yet it is unlikely that their critical employees would loudly and publicly commend each other every time they do their job.
In the House chamber recently, some members congratulated themselves for passing a budget bill that will most likely be amended by the Senate and signed into law with line-item vetoes. One House member said, “Many of you did not know that the members and chairman had to stay here until 2 a.m. these past weeks….”
Well. Perhaps House members should attend one of those federally funded professional development sessions on time management.
