by Bruno Behrend
Greg Blankenship of the Illinois Policy Institute, just put up a post sounding the dangers of a "Gross Receipts Tax (GRT). " Given that I'm getting to be more and more of an agnostic on the ideological hodge-podge of debating one form of tax over another, I'm less interested in what form at tax takes than I am in seeing either a freeze or reduction in taxation - particularly in Illinois. I asked Greg for some sources of information on the effects of a GRT and he sent me to the Tax Foundation, where I found this...
From a "Tax Foundation" page on the GRT... "Yesterday Texas joined a growing list of states with gross receipt style taxes when Governor Perry signed into law a new franchise tax to comply with a court mandate to improve education funding. The updated franchise tax levies a 1 percent tax on the gross receipts of businesses in Texas (retailers pay a .5 percent rate), but exempts sole proprietorships and general partnerships. Businesses can elect to deduct either the cost of goods sold or employment costs." ___ As God is my witness, decent, freedom-loving people will either make the necessary effort to expose the "Education funding" scam for what it is, or we will eventually be taxed into oblivion while our kids are turned into a class of low-level managers. Good Golly People!! We carp about GRTs, Property Taxes, etc. etc. etc. but we refuse to go after the source of the problem - which is nothing more (or less) than the public's unwarranted support of a corrupt and unsupportable bureaucracy that is bankrupting entire states while mis-educating their children. It's as if everyone is brainwashed into ignoring the problem, and therefore cause us to focus on issues that divide rather than unite. We'll go cuckoo for Clones, silly over $tem $ells, and bonkers over babies. We then immolate ourselves over immigration, garrote ourselves over God, Guns, & Gays, and titillate ourselves over taxes, but we won't go public with the truth about the source of the attacks on our culture and our pocketbooks. That truth is... that the Education Establishment
!!!!! Education funding - Education funding - Education funding !!!!!! The fake debate/issue that gave "conservative" Texas its first GRT and destroyed Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights is the same debate that is driving all of the tax talk in Illinois.
___
(Big Ed or Ed-Mart - always the high price, always)
with it's teachers,
their unions,
their substandard curricula,
their piggish Administrators,
and all of the waste and corruption they engage in,
are destroying the financial AND cultural underpinnings of Illinois. (and the USA, I might add)
___
Wanna stop the GRT? Then go after the corrupt institution that makes a GRT necessary. If we beat BIG ED here, then they are beat everywhere. Further, I can practically guarantee you that nothing will improve until BIG ED is defeated, and once defeated, everything else will improve.
With that in mind, I point you to the newly updated essay I wrote up a year or so ago entitled A Conceptual Framework for Undermining Support for Public Education.
Boiled down to a few words, the essay points out that The Education Establishment consists of a trained class of liars, and that cultural research/data show that once you convince people they've been lied to, and they will turn on Public Education faster than anyone could imagine.
