Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Is this how ?pro-business? lawmakers treat Idaho business?


If it's not a huge new, overpowering discount box store showing up in their neighborhood or an erratic and unpredictable consumer economy dampening their sales, then Idaho's retail businesses are being nibbled to death by cost-cutting catalog sharks on the Internet.

Once again, Idaho's legislative handmaidens of Internet catalog giants have sent the disheartening message to Gem State retailers they really don't care about problems of uneven and legalized unfair competition.

Despite high hopes that a polished new version would be voted on this year, a proposed sales tax on Internet retailers was killed in the breech by the state House Revenue and Taxation Committee 10-8 before it could reach the full Legislature.

Lawmakers from upstate Kootenai County were tickled pink with the bill being ash-canned. And why not? One of America's giants in Internet retail sales, Coldwater Creek, is headquartered there.

So much for Idaho's "pro-business" Republican legislators whose favoritism is questionable.

It's a pity accurate Internet sales revenue figures aren't available. They would conclusively show the unfair disparity between the sales taxes being paid into state coffers by Idaho retailers and the 6 percent break the Internet catalogers get for their bottom-line profits.

But the loss to the state is substantial.

One Republican member of the taxation committee, Rep. Lenore Barrett, opined after the proposed bill's dumping that "I don't like tax hikes" and "the state has enough money."

That's an interesting spin for someone who claims to be informed. Putting the same tax on Internet catalog sales as on local business is not a "tax hike." It's called evening the playing field. And if the state has "enough money" as she claims, how come legislators complain of not having enough money to fund reasonable, sensible, needed programs?

One of these days, lawmakers who provide tax loopholes for Internet sales will wake up and discover that local retailers are slowly losing sales to Internet retailers and even going out of business and therefore are unable to pay a state sales tax any longer, thus leaving the state treasury looking for new sources.

More than $1 billion in tax exemptions and waivers are on the state books now. Critics of those exemptions should now take time to add up the budget requests for programs that are being denied and then compare the two lists.

Then Idahoans will have a clearer picture of how much is not being funded by lawmakers because of unfair breaks to some businesses at the expense of others.




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