Editor: Baton Rouge’s strange love affair with sales taxes

As Legislators and Gov. Bobby Jindal begin focusing on tax reform, Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball says there’s a problem with any reform package that dramatically reduces Louisiana’s reliance on regressive sales taxes. “For a great many in Baton Rouge, the best tax is no tax, but if you’re going to have a tax, make it a sales tax,” Ball writes in his latest column. Ball says most Louisianans prefer sales taxes over others because it’s a consumption tax that can, in principle, be regulated by personal behavior; and it’s also one that everyone pays—including the poor, who may not be on the hook for income or property taxes. But Ball also suspects few people actually know how much they pay in sales taxes because there’s no annual accounting of it. In other words, the sales tax is a “stealth tax,” Ball says. “Yes, we know sales taxes exist, but we’ve come to think of them simply as an added cost for the stuff we want to acquire,” he says. “We’ll nearly riot in protest over a tax proposal that raises one’s property taxes by $2.25 per month, yet we happily and blindly fork over $27 in sales taxes to get an iPhone 5, enabling us to tweet our hatred of the proposed property tax hike.” Read the full column here. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.