It’s a week before Christmas, and already we have treats under the Session tree! The Legislative Research Council has opened up the 2024 Session website, which lists this fine Monday morning 16 bills and one resolution for the upcoming action in Pierre, which begins January 9.
Leading off the House agenda is Representative Chris Karr (R-11/Sioux Falls), whose House Bill 1001 would make permanent the sales tax cut, from 4.5% to 4.2%, that he got the House to pass last year. Representative Karr and his Republican colleagues chose that broad tax cut instead of the food tax repeal that Governor Kristi Noem promised during her reëlection campaign but failed to stay focused on during the 2023 Session. The 2023 Legislature imposed a sunset clause of June 30, 2027, just in case those three tenths of a percentage point knocked too much revenue out of the stream or in case voters approve a food tax repeal on the ballot in 2024. But revenue growth apparently remains strong enough (the Karr cut was 6.7%, but sales tax receipts are down just 2.0% from FY2023 year to date and up 1.9% from the Legislature’s projections) that Karr thinks we afford to keep the rate at 4.2%, even if voters decide to knock another $123.9 million in food tax out of the budget.
To that end, HB 1001 simply strikes the sunset clause from Karr’s 2023 sales tax cut legislation.
Since her own tax cut failure last winter, Governor Noem has groused that she wants the Legislature to make Karr’s sales tax cut permanent. Legislators should thus be eager to send Karr’s easy HB 1001 to her desk.
Keeping the poorest South Dakotans in poverty is the SDGOP path to glory, Cory.
The state Republican Party denies the Anthropocene, the Native American Genocide and the legacy of slavery while rich lawyers like Lee Schoenbeck scramble to cover up the crimes being committed against South Dakota’s workforce. Utilities and banks are using the state as a tax haven languishing in the regressive tax structure with which Schoenbeck, a member of a pedophile cult and the National Ravage Association (NRA), raises his campaign money.
It’s hardly a new phenomenon.
http://blog.keloland.com/politicsinkeloland/2015/08/07/lee-schoenbeck-goes-all-ethan-hunt-on-taxes-for-teacher-salaries/
http://www.argusleader.com/story/opinion/voices/2016/01/06/voice-welfare-expansion-will-make-sd-sick/78374138/
A state that calls itself conservative depends on federal Social Security benefits to pay the property taxes that currently bankroll the bulk of South Dakota’s moocher state bills while video lootery drives poor residents even further into despair.
South Dakota deserves the legislature it suffers.
kristi Nope had no intention of repealing the sales tax on food. She only voiced it when Jamie Smith’s promise seemed to be catching on.