Nailing the poor
To Republican state Rep. Frank Bruneel, Idaho’s 5
percent sales tax on food is the Great Equalizer. It imposes a burden on
everyone, rich and poor alike, to share in the costs of government.
That seems to please Rep. Bruneel, a no-nonsense Lewiston
businessman who finds pragmatic symbolism, if not compassion, in the
pennies coughed up by the tax on a basket of food, and thus far is so
devoted to the tax he’s blocked repeal or reduction of the food tax.
The vast difference between a minimum wage earner’s
ability to pay taxes on his family’s food and, say, a mid-level
executive’s has yet to dawn on Bruneel.
Since Idaho lawmakers are hoping to slash $200 million in
taxes because of a budget surplus, why the likes of Bruneel insist on
preserving the food tax is an utter mystery, if not callous stubbornness.
According to a state tax spokesman, the food tax will
yield about $136 million in fiscal 2002.
Since the poor are less likely to own taxable property, or
earn large taxable incomes, or make major taxable purchases, all that’s
left for the state to nail them on is the food they eat.
This remaining vestige of tax-it-if-it-moves thinking
should be abolished, and, if need be, replaced with revenues derived
elsewhere, not on the necessities to stay alive.
Surely enough legislators see this and have the conscience
and good sense to stand up to Rep. Bruneel and demand an end to the tax.
