{"id":1338,"date":"2010-09-30T13:21:41","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T18:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/?p=1338"},"modified":"2017-11-30T12:02:40","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T17:02:40","slug":"gsftc-singing-same-old-tune-of-more-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/2010\/09\/30\/gsftc-singing-same-old-tune-of-more-taxes\/","title":{"rendered":"GSFTC Singing Same Old Tune of More Taxes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Report From GSFTC Forum<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a firsthand report from the \u2018fair\u2019 tax forum that was held in Nashua last night. We can say we told you so. This reporter should have brought up these two studies (AIM and Yankee Institute – see ‘Documents’ in menu under ‘Resources’) which show that in states that have high property taxes, income tax as well as a sales tax, did NOT lower their property taxes and in fact, have property taxes that are among the highest in the nation. They are also doing less well economically than states with NO income or sales tax\u2026<\/p>\n

Please note that every organization invited to attend was pro-income tax \u2014 not one taxpayer advocacy group from NH (NHAC, CNHT) was invited.<\/p>\n

My wife and I went to the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC) meeting in Nashua last night. By way of a report, the meeting was a panel discussion by three experts in public policy and taxation. It was well organized and the audience was very polite. The moderator did not allow questions to be asked directly from the floor\u2013rather, you wrote your questions on a 3 x 5 card and then he read the question to the panel…<\/p>\n

Overall, the basic premise of the group is the current NH system that relies on a significant portion of state\/local revenue to the collected from property tax is \u201cunfair\u201d, while a tax system based on sales and income taxes would be \u201cmore fair\u201d. This is, in their view, compounded by dire predictions of tax \u201ccollection shortfalls\u201d on the order of 15% in the upcoming years. The only \u201cplausible\u201d solution presented was enactment of sales and income taxes to address the \u201cfairness\u201d issue and reduce the \u201cshortfall\u201d.<\/p>\n

The only flaws I saw in their arguments were:<\/p>\n

1. They could not prove that a sales and income tax would, in fact, be \u201cmore fair\u201d than the current system. For example, their numbers show that the upper 1% of NH taxpayers contribute more than 20 times more taxes to the state than the bottom 20%. To me, this hardly seems like \u201cthe rich\u201d not paying their \u201cfair share\u201d.<\/p>\n

2. There was no discussion on looking at spending cuts to address the \u201ccollection shortfalls\u201d discussed. State spending was treated as a \u201cgiven\u201d and seen as sacrosanct.<\/em><\/p>\n

And there you have it, just as we told you it would be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Report From GSFTC Forum This is a firsthand report from the \u2018fair\u2019 tax forum that was held in Nashua last night. We can say we told you so. This reporter should have brought up these two studies (AIM and Yankee Institute – see ‘Documents’ in menu under ‘Resources’) which show that in states that have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16,50,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broadbased","category-taxes","category-the-pledge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1338"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5335,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1338\/revisions\/5335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}