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SB 68: Give Counties Option to Tax Entertainment

Pick your headline:

  • Legislators Try Again to Offer Counties Additional Revenue Stream
  • “No New Taxes” RINOs Join Socialists in Supporting New County Tax
  • Bipartisan Coalition Fighting to Help County Budgets
  • Legislators Pass Buck, Not Bucks, to Counties

All four describe Senate Bill 68, which would give counties the option to levy a one percent tax on gross receipts from hotels, motels, campgrounds, and other temporary lodging; alcoholic beverages; restaurants; and ticket sales to “places of amusement, athletic, and cultural events.”

Senator Wayne Steinhauer (R-9/Hartford) has rounded up fourteen Republican and five Democratic co-sponsors for this optional and limited county sales tax. Steinhauer owns the Best Western in Murdo, so he’d have to charge his lodgers the SB 68 tax, if Jones County ever enacted it. Senator Al Novstrup (R-3/Aberdeen) runs go-kart palaces in Sioux Falls, Watertown, and Aberdeen; Minnehaha, Codington, and Brown counties could all take a little cash out of his amusement customers’ hides.

These nobly self-sacrificing entrepreneurs may have trouble passing Senate Bill 68. Past optional county tax measures have failed… and hey, giving counties the chance to raise their own revenues on tourism and entertainment would make it harder for the state to strong-arm counties into taking their CAFO bribes and stinking up their countrysides with giant meat/milk/manure factories.

4 Comments

  1. Bob Newland 2020-01-27 19:48

    These pathetic strokes make me pathetic.

  2. Debbo 2020-01-27 21:54

    The SDGOP likes to raise taxes, but they rarely call it that and structure them so others are affected. So yeah, this won’t pass.

  3. Porter Lansing 2020-01-28 10:52

    Who said SD taxing entertainment is like FL taxing snow? Be nice, now!

  4. Buckobear 2020-01-28 15:51

    How ‘bout taxing good ‘ole sexual intercourse ?? Conjugal in the marriage bed, one night stands, something on the side and maybe even “same sex” arrangements.
    Total honesty required.
    Let’s tax the braggarts ……….

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