Second Amendment Sales Tax Holiday in South Carolina:
The State reports:
Hunters and collectors can save some money on gun purchases today and Saturday as the state waives sales taxes on firearms....
State Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Greenwood, said he proposed the tax-free sales to celebrate the Second Amendment and respond to a then-pending U.S. Supreme Court decision on a Washington, D.C., handgun ban, which the court overturned....
The tax-free days also coincide with the opening of the duck and small-game hunting seasons this week, Pitts said.
“It’s to bring recognition that the Second Amendment of the Constitution is every bit as important as the First Amendment,” which establishes freedom of religion and speech, Pitts said. “It’s very much symbolic.” ...
Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.
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That's a new one on me.
How about a year of general Repealofest housecleaning to recognize the Tenth?
They really should stop selling Kool-Aid at NRA conventions.
I remember buying an expensive item from Costco in Massachusetts. I did not buy it during the sales tax holiday. Since I returned it without a receipt, at first they did not want to refund the sales tax (which I did pay) on the theory that I might have purchased the item on the sales tax holiday. It was quite a hassle convincing them that they should also refund the sales tax. I was a little annoyed that this sales tax holiday, which did not benefit me, was imposing unnecessary costs on me.
In my view, the administrative costs that sales tax holidays impose on business and consumers make this a less efficient tax cut compared to other possible tax cuts. Also, it creates rather arbitrary incentives to do your purchases on a particular day, creating artificial congestion on that day.
If you want to cut sales tax, I say cut it for every day of the year. Calculate how much revenue will be lost from your sales tax holiday and lower the sales tax by an appropriate amount.
If you want to do something that is symbolic (not really about cutting taxes), pass a resolution. Do not pass "symbolic" legislation that will increase transaction costs. On the other hand, if you really do want to cut taxes, do it in a way that is as efficient as possible and is as administratively convenient as possible to comply with.
I think that retailers enjoy a net benefit from the sales tax holiday. So they don't oppose it. But, that doesn't mean they and everyone else in society wouldn't benefit even more from a more efficient tax cut.
Look at it this way. If a tax cut results in X dollars revenue loss to the state but only transfers to business and consumers X - A (where A represents increased administrative costs and lost time due to artificial congestion) then it seems to me there might be room to make a more efficient tax cut by minimizing the size of A.
The summer before I started law school, the shoe store I worked at had a faulty computerized cash register. We got to ring up our summer clearance sales the old fashioned way -- paper receipts, using the hand calculator to sum and compute taxes, carbon imprints of credit cards, and calling into the banks to get approval for transactions. Fun.
If people were perfect economic agents, sales tax holidays would have no effect but to shift purchasing to the days they happen on. But they do increase consumption.
I am unaware of a federal sales tax, It seems that every day is a Federal Tax holiday.
The Tenth Amendment gets honored every time they stuff us in the collective breach (did I say that correctly?).
With less cheek, as we load-shed the wrongheaded leavings of yesteryear, there needs to be a sane transition plan.
Will some of the proposed legislation of the new administration trigger a big Tenth Amendment backlash?
Oh, I got the refund. Eventually. But only after I got the manager involved and so on. It unnecessarily consumed my time and the time of Costco employees.
Somebody call the ACLU: This is their opportunity to demonstrate that they ARE willing to defend the 2nd amendment... As they claim to understand it.
Seriously, I can see neither the rationale, nor the enumerated powers basis, for such a federal law, and a quick search didn't turn up any evidence of it existing. What's the basis of this?
-- Seriously, I can see neither the rationale, nor the enumerated powers basis, for such a federal law --
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There is a Federal Excise Tax of 11% on guns and ammunition, each unaffected by state laws that relate to sales tax. [Firearms and Ammunition Excise Tax (FAET)]
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Maybe the author of the original report just made up a statement about a federal law that forbids states from waiving their own sales tax on certain items. Wouldn't be the first time a reporter blew it.
No, I think the journalist made a mistake or passed one along. Maybe someone was thinking of an actual federal excise tax on firearms and ammunition (FAET). A state can set its own taxes but can't mess around with federal ones. Obviously SC can't waive FAET. Someone might have thought that was why ammunition would still be taxed. The real reason is probably that the legislature decided not to include anything but firearms in the tax holiday.
So, note that SC is exempting firearms but not any sort of accessory, apparel, etc. People getting ready for hunting season will head to outdoors stores, look at tax-free guns, and buy a bunch of other stuff that will still be taxed. Meanwhile state legislators get to brag about how constitutional and pro-gun they are.
One, I'm questioning it, two, no society has ever had "total freedom of speech", three, self defense is a more basic right than speech because one is often separated from an audience for speech but one is never apart from one's self, four, the government isn't really "enforcing" freedoms, unless "enforce" means "guarantee no legal right to interfere with", which it doesn't.
Just because you had an annoying experience with a sales tax holiday (which, to be fair, was caused solely by your forgetting your receipt at home) doesn't mean sales tax holidays impose unnecessary or inappropriate "administrative burdens" on anyone.
I believe you may be confusing state sales tax with the Pittman-Robertson Act which hunters pushed for long ago to put serious money into conservation. That is an excise tax that is at the federal level and will not be on holiday.
cboldt and bama, you are right on. Didn't know if you knew where the excise tax came from.
Depending upon your urban environment, firearms might reasonably fall into either category.
Florida has abandoned both this year (the omnipresent budgetary reasons).
To be fair. I did not forget my receipt. I purposely did not save it or bring it -- you do not need your receipt to make returns to Costco. They have all your purchases in their computer system. I know this very well. I have returned items to Costco without a receipt with no problems whatsoever on multiple occasions.
There would not have been any problem whatsoever this time EXCEPT for the sales tax holiday. (And I did not even shop on that day.) Your point that sales tax holiday's impose "no administrative burdens" is clearly false.
Further, you are making the assumption that everyone uses the same system for accounting for sales tax, and that this system always makes it administratively convenient to account for different rates of sales tax on different days. In fact, different businesses use different systems.
Finally, you are ignoring completely another cost, and that is the cost of artificial congestion as people time their major purchases for a particular day when sales tax will not be charged. Not to mention the inconvenience of artificially adjusting the purchase date of such purchases to coincide with this arbitrary tax holiday.
On the whole, sales tax holidays are an inefficient way to cut sales taxes. The state loses X dollars in revenue, but taxpayers only gain X - A dollars in savings. I prefer, as much as possible, that when the state loses X dollars in revenue due to a tax cut that taxpayers gain X dollars in savings.
Sorry. None of them left...
The problem I have with your argument is that businesses must already account for sales that are exempt from sales tax. For instance when selling to a reseller, though I suppose MA could be so regressive as to not have that typical exemption.
I have to wonder if the Costco folks were just yanking their chain for some reason.
We do have an option to turn off sales tax on a customer's entire purchase, but a) we'd have to remember to do that for every sale, and b) on our (windows-based) register, sales tax has a distinct tendency to turn itself back on if anything, such as adding another item, happens between turning it off and entering payment. So a sales tax holiday would slow us down substantially.
jccamp - It's spam in Chinese. I took it over to babelfish, and it's just an un-punctuated list of services people might want to buy.
Actually, it's Chinese, not Korean. But spam, nevertheless. "Bestmishu.com" seems to target blogs. You could always click on a link . . .
If you had checked, you would see that South Carolina does indeed have a similar tax-free respect for the exercise of the First Amendment.... newspapers and religious materials are exempted from state sales tax in South Carolina.
I would, but I don't want to accidentally violate the terms of service, not speaking the lingua franca, so to speak...
Summary: The Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to cooperate with the States, through their respective State fish and game departments, in wildlife-restoration projects. However, per statute, no money apportioned under this chapter to any state shall be expended until the state in question assents to the provisions of this chapter and has passed laws for the conservation of wildlife, which includes a prohibition against the diversion of license fees paid by hunters for any other purpose than the administration of said state's fish and game department. The Act also provides for grants for hunter education programs and a mechanism for a multi-state conservation grant program.
From the Violence Policy Center
http://www.vpc.org/studies/leadfour.htm
# Give first priority for Pittman-Robertson funds to cleaning up and repairing lead damage to public lands�such as national parks�caused by "slob shooters" and others in the shooting sports. New federal legislation earmarks at least $7.5 million each fiscal year for hunter education and "the enhancement of construction or development of firearm shooting ranges...and the updating of safety features of firearm shooting ranges...." As this report documents, serious resources need to be devoted to cleaning up the lead pollution generated by shooting ranges. Pittman-Robertson funds should first be devoted to this task. Resources should also be dedicated to repairing the environmental damage inflicted by "slob shooters."
# Redirect a portion of Pittman-Robertson funds from the sale of handguns and handgun ammunition to paying the cost of handgun lethality and injury. Firearms cause tens of thousands of deaths and injuries every year, at a staggering cost to our public health system. In 1998 alone, 30,708 Americans died by gunfire. Since 1960, more than a million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides, and unintentional shootings. Nearly three times that number are treated in emergency rooms each year for nonfatal injuries. Most of this carnage is caused by handguns. The nation's health care system should have a superior claim on funds derived from the sale of handguns and ammunition. This money should be restricted to funding trauma centers, for example, rather than shooting ranges.