Matt Blunt's Tax Holiday Hurts Tax Spenders

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch finds some to dislike the annual sales tax holiday coming up this weekend, a back-to-school break for taxpayers. Unsurprisingly, it's tax-spenders:

But Gary Markenson, executive director of the Missouri Municipal League, said the chamber report is "malarkey." The league commissioned researchers at the University of Missouri to study last year's holiday. Markenson said they found that state and local governments lost a total of about $18.5 million in taxes.

The sales tax holiday doesn't encourage people to buy more, Markenson said. Instead, shoppers make all of their major purchases in one weekend and deprive cities of money necessary for public services such as fire and police departments, he said. The league's research found that participating cities saw a small but relatively insignificant increase in total sales for the weekend. Markenson foresees a politicized battle over the tax holiday that pits state entities, such as the chamber of commerce, and big businesses against municipal governments.

It's not about encouraging people to buy more; it's about providing a break to families to whom the end of summer represents the rat in the python of purchases as they ready their children for school with new clothes, supplies, backpacks, laptop computers, SUVs, and so on.

But fortunately, the tax-spending entities have a handy league with an unaccountable-to-the-public leader to spout off on how working families should be forced to spend that extra $18.5 million dollars on government fluff. This keeps the actual cities and their elected or hired leaders from having to clamor for more taxes or for taxing the populace unabated.

And kudos to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for its deep investigative research in uncovering this guy, which undoubtedly including reading his press release or answering the phone when he called.