Proponents of M15 hard at work
J-Ellis wrote a great column today about how the healthcare industry in SD is pushing to promote a sales tax increase that will pump up to $85 million into their coffers;
Well, the U.S. House advertising won’t win any awards. But on the horizon comes the long-awaited campaign from the people who hope you’re going to vote to raise your own taxes. According to documents collected by Argus Leader reporters and reporter David Montgomery’s account, the people running Moving South Dakota Forward are preparing to spend more than $250,000 in October on television ads.
We won’t know until the campaign reports donations, but it’s a safe bet that the effort will be bankrolled by the major nonprofit hospital systems in South Dakota. And by major nonprofit hospital systems, you can count those on one hand, even if that hand happened to lose a couple digits in a blender accident.
The two hospital goliaths in Sioux Falls spent a good chunk of change to help win voter approval of a new events center last November. One of them, and this is no place to name names, subsequently has spent more money to secure the partial naming rights for said facility. That same nonprofit hospital system is building a fancy sports complex of its own, thanks in part to a generous tax subsidy.
So let’s assume the hospitals are the major contributors to the IM 15 campaign. It won’t be lost on a lot of voters that the hospitals stand to make a lot of money if IM 15 passes. After all, they see a lot of Medicaid patients, and injecting $85 million a year into Medicaid certainly would mean higher reimbursement rates for the professionals and organizations that provide those services.
Few campaigns are perfect. IM 15 asks the state’s voters to sacrifice more of their money in the name of children, the poor and the elderly. That will be a tough sell.
But the sales job will only be tougher if voters think that by opening their wallets, they are only contributing more to the coffers of the nonprofit hospital systems.
Remember just a few years ago the same organizations pumped thousands of dollars into newspaper advertising to help kill Medical Marijuana Measure 13 which was polling well until the ads came out, crushing M13. Of course the healthcare industry had a lot to lose if M13 passed. They want you to use and buy their expensive narcotic painkillers instead of a natural, less expensive, more effective drug like marijuana. They will use the same tactics this time around to suck more money out of us. And they will probably use the tired old argument that if we don’t increase sales taxes there will be an income tax. Hogwash. As long as Republicans run Pierre (which will probably be for the next 1,000 years) there will be NO income tax in SD. Remember also, if this tax increase is approved by voters, this will just give the state the go ahead to spend the other 4 pennies on whatever they want, like refunds and bailouts to companies and corporations that want to locate here. Tune out there message as much as possible and vote NO on M15, unless of course you like subsidizing Sports Complexes and Entertainment facilities.
No second penney for T Denny!
Buy on the internet. I spent 2k last week and paid zero tax. I’d love to support the state and would spend here but I’m aware of how corrupt the city is and will do whatever I can to deplete them.
Pathloss I’m sure you already are aware that legally you are required to track all of those purchases and pay use taxes on them right?
Not that anyone does this, but if a business failed to pay use taxes on out-of-state purchases it could come back to haunt them during a state audit. Not that this matters – the general concensus is that all Internet purchases will be taxed within the next five years anyway. Companies like Amazon acknowledge it is only a matter of time.
You should (in theory) still be able to avoid city taxes however. So that may save you two or three percent.
Craig – no – will not be able to avoid city taxes with Internet taxation programming. They have been determined by zip codes in even the old 20th century the e-commerce programming I used in the waaayyy waaaay back. I would suspect they will be linked to GPS algoritmns linked to delivery addresses in any future iterration.
For example, you buy a Christmas present for your snow-bird uncle holede up in AZ for the Winter – from your SD home – you will pay AZ sales taxes based on the point of delivery = POP.
Silly. Yet we allow people to sell perfectly safe Mary Jane and charge no taxes. Hmmm.
The answer to Scott’s rhetorical question is “YES”.
SDAHO PAC (the lobbying group for the American Hospital Association-of which Sanford is a member) is pumping at least $75,000 into the promotion of initiated measure 15 – via their donations to “Moving S.D. Forward”. Proof is at the link below:
http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance/committee.phtml?c=11790
My parent company already charges sales tax on all out of state orders to states which have sales tax. One way around this is for the customer to call via phone – so they bypass the internet and save the sales tax. Tennessee customers especially like this.