Wednesday, April 30, 2008

State Senate Votes to Eliminate Income Tax: Bill goes to House

The Louisiana Senate, to their own surprise, voted to abolish the state income tax. Senator Nick Gautreaux added an amendment to Buddy Shaw's SB 87 which proposed to cut tax rates. Gautreaux proposed going all the way by just eliminating the income tax.
Unbelievably, the amendment passed.

My Bad
Sen. Joe McPherson, D-Woodworth, apologized to Shaw and fellow senators, saying the amendment would never have been adopted if he hadn't been "playing one of my cutesy games." He said he thought the amendment was going to fail, so he voted for it because, "I didn't want to go on record voting against repealing income taxes."
Gautreaux said his move was "sincere. I sincerely want to repeal income taxes" and he has tried twice before to do it but his bills were killed in committee. "It's taxpayers' money and Louisianans have been overtaxed too many years,."
Gautreaux said the governor's proposed budget has $400 million in new spending in it and "if it goes into the bill, it's there forever. For them to say there's not money to afford this is absolutely not true."
Sen. Robert Adley of Benton told the Senate "the governor will veto the bill with $4 billion (in budget reductions) and he ought to."

H/T The Reduct Box

2 comments:

June Butler said...

Playing "cutesy games" is a really bad thing to do when you are serving in the legislature, Sen. McPherson. You vote for bills that you want to pass, and you vote against those you don't want to pass. It's not a game.

Oh, the stupidity!

Jim said...

That is pitiful, isn't it? So much of that posturing goes on and it hurts everyone. I respect Sen Gautreaux for introducing the amendment; this is obviously his cause. How can you possibly respect 'cutesy games'? And what kind of idiot would stand up in public and admit to it?