With new tax policies on the books, and given the holy hell the Legislature and Edwards Administration went through to create them, this week felt like the right time for LaPolitics to check on the anticipated revenue. While they were at it, they also sought political forecasts from the men who hold the Capitol’s most important gavels.
The questions were simple. “Have you seen any early reports on how tax collections are going? Or just general reactions to the tax-related work product of the Legislature this year?”
- Senate President John Alario: “Everything seems to be where they’ve estimated at this point. We’re so anxious to see what happens once we get the sales tax collections coming from internet sales, we’ll see if that’ll give us a bump or maybe even hopefully increase local sales taxes. That could encourage people to begin shopping more at home if they don’t have that advantage of shopping online. So that may be an avenue that could happen.”
- House Speaker Taylor Barras: “I don’t think our July collection report is out yet. So I haven’t seen those numbers yet. Of course, you have the effect of the lower sales tax. You also have the effect of some of our exemptions that were changed or were done away with in a different way. So you have a couple of things working. It’s hard to make a call after only one month of collection. We’ll see with what that first quarter of the fiscal year looks like toward the end of September and October. Of course, this is not real heavy tax filing season, so you until you get a little bit later in the year, it’ll be hard to judge. We can normally gauge with what sales tax has done and compare it to previous years and get a pretty good read… We’ll be collecting 0.55 cents less per penny, so it’ll be down, possibly some of the exemptions and credits help balance that. I think, in the end, we’ll be curious to see what the first six months look like by the time we hit the executive budget in January.”
They Said It: “I think I called him a ‘butthead,’ and I meant it.”—U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, on former CIA Director John Brennan, on CNN
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.
