How will shifting from the income tax to the sales tax be hurtful to the middle class?
The sales tax is a much more regressive tax system. A family making $45,000 will spend a much higher percentage of their income on living and therefore paying [sales] taxes than someone making $150,000 who will not spend the same amount of money. Under the current sales-tax base, to replace the income tax totally, and that includes the corporate income tax where we get almost $9 billion of our $17 billion state budget, you’d have to raise the sales-tax rate six pennies. So you’d have a state sales tax of close to 10 percent in addition to the local Atlanta 4 percent. If we were to do that, the middle-income folks would be hurt by that. If we’re going to have a revenue-neutral tax reform and we’re going to give large tax breaks to one population, somebody else has got to pay. And almost all these proposals floating around are giving the tax breaks to the upper-income [taxpayers]. How do we break through the schism between narrow corporate interests and the interests of the broader popul
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