Jeremy Alford says you can call it a tax or a fee, or even a penalty or a fine.
“By any name, increasing them still means individuals and businesses will be expected to pay more,” Alford writes in his latest column. “In Louisiana, they’re all on the table this session inside a legal cornucopia that allows for blurred lines and, possibly, a bounty of hundreds of millions of dollars in new payments from you and yours.”
Creative wordplay has always been a hallmark of Louisiana politics, Alford notes, but this year he says it’s a sport, and definitions are important.
“A tax is a charge on goods and services implemented by the government to raise money. A fee is a similar charge, but in Louisiana can only be used to recoup the cost of what is being provided to the payer,” he notes. “Fines and penalties are monetary punishments for an infraction.”
Gov. Bobby Jindal has said he will not approve any new taxes or tax increases this session, unless they are offset by reductions elsewhere in the budget, thus making them revenue neutral. But Alford notes the governor is willing to approve fee increases, as long as they fit the definition above and aren’t taxes in disguise. He has a record of supporting fines and penalties, too, Alford says, and they will all be needed to fill a $1.6 billion budget hole.
“Jindal’s etched-in-stone revenue philosophy can be found in his fee-tax-refund plan for higher education,” Alford writes. “The administration is supporting as much as $100 million in new ‘excellence fees,’ to be charged by universities and colleges, which would be offset by a new tax refund for those who pay them. The refund, in turn, would be bankrolled by an increase in the state’s cigarette tax.”
It’s supposed to be revenue neutral: $100 million in new fees collected by public universities, another $100 million in increased taxes collected by the state and $100 million for the related refunds.
“It may read like a $100 million net revenue increase for the public sector, but the administration insists it is not,” Alford writes. “Joining higher ed in its push, at least eight state departments and agencies have proposed $74 million worth of new fees and fee increases. The administration argues that inflation and growth have slowly jacked up the cost of doing business, and that the increases are needed to keep pace.”
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
