Which has the better ring...Taxas or Taxachusetts?

[flaminbats]

Another complaint raised Saturday, mostly by Democrats but also by Round Rock Republican Mike Krusee ("I'll vote for it now to move the process along, but it will be a very difficult vote on the floor"), is that the new "payroll" tax, offered to replace the franchise tax, unfairly targets labor-intensive industries and indeed creates incentives to cut both wages and employees. Dallas Democrat Helen Giddings pointed out that two companies with identical gross payrolls could pay radically different taxes (currently set at $500 per employee) based on their number of employees, penalizing, for example, service industries and their mostly low-income workers. Border reps are additionally sensitive to the economic imbalance in the tax, which will favor capital-intensive industries long blessed in the state, like oil and gas and petrochemicals, against fledgling small businesses with many low-paid employees.

There were similar complaints about the increased and broadened sales taxes (booze, billboards, newspapers), which hit most regressively at the lowest-income taxpayers – numerous in Texas numbers but not easy to hear at the Lege. Dick Lavine of the Center for Public Policy Priorities described the revenue plan succinctly in the Houston Chronicle: "Mainly what this does is shift the responsibility for supporting our schools onto people who work for a living and the low- and moderate-income families who already pay the highest percentage of their income in sales tax. It's piling on the folks at the bottom in order to provide tax cuts for businesses and people who own property."
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-05-07/pols_capitol.html



Surprisingly the most rightwing position I could find on Mitt Romney was opposing a moratorium on charter schools. Even Clinton opposed that! But the lack of info on state politics is why I am holding this debate. How can Republicans knock a state for having both a Republican Governor and Lt. Governor for nearly 14 years?

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/columnists/view.bg?articleid=67798