The Mobile Register: The Perfidious Penny Tax

In just 21 minutes last Tuesday, six members of Mobile’s City Council (all but Bess Rich) broke faith with their citizens, sandbagged taxpayers, hurt the city’s long-term economic development, delayed the impetus for broader tax reform, enshrined bloated municipal government as what amounts to a permanent condition, refused to remove an anvil from the backs of the city’s working poor and showed themselves utterly contemptuous of the basic concepts underlying representative government.

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Second, the sales tax falls hardest on the working poor. Indeed, in 2009, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy confirmed what economists long have known, namely that sales and taxes are the most regressive common taxes of all. Why? Because the poor, by necessity, spend a larger portion of their incomes on taxable purchases than do the wealthy, who save and invest more instead (and when they do spend, have more ways to buy from low-tax jurisdictions).This is especially true in Alabama, which does not exempt food and other basics from its sales taxes.

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