Kansas's
state House voted early this morning in favor of a tax bill
that adds to the burden of funding state government for poor
families. The bill would raise the sales tax rate from 6.15 percent to 6.5
percent. Since the poor spend more of their money
on
basic goods and services, they are likely to be affected disproportionately by
the legislation.
The
decision by the lower chamber is the
latest new demand that Kansas has placed on the poor. "It's hard to
imagine that what we have right now could get worse, but this actually makes it
worse," said Annie McKay, the executive director of the Kansas Center for
Economic Growth, which is a research organization in Topeka.
Earlier
this year, the Republican majority codified controversial restrictions on
how welfare recipients can spend their money, barring them from using
public benefits at swimming pools and movie theaters, among other
establishments. Lawmaker’s also limited ATM withdrawals for welfare
recipients to $25 a day, a
measure critics said would make life far more difficult for the poor. Those
changes followed a decision several years ago to overhaul taxes in a way
that boosted the incomes of the middle class and wealthy but reduced the
incomes of poor families, by raising sales taxes and by limiting a provision
that exempted food purchases from sales taxes.
This
chart shows the impact of the overhaul:
Critics
of the new provisions say they would make a regressive tax code even more
regressive. Under current law, the bottom fifth of earners pay 4.7 percent of
their income in general sales taxes (not including specialized business and
excise taxes), compared to 0.7 percent for the top 1 percent of earners,
according to the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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