The Herald is reporting that the Senate has passed a provision allowing municipalities to enact a local-option meals tax of up to 2% on top of the statewide 5% tax. I haven’t seen this elsewhere, including from the Senate President’s office, which makes me less than 100% confident in the report’s accuracy. Take it FWIW until we get further confirmation.
Senate update: Senate passes local option for meals tax
david
| Tue, May 19, 2009
8:20 PM EST
Discuss
5 Comments . Comments are closed.The Globe has it too
Michael Levenson has a story on the front page. Second sentence of third graf:
Great scheme to kill every mom and pop restaurant in MA
or encourage them to fail to report sales. Either way everyone loses.
I know----how about we cut out every "feel good" program that the taxpayers fund. Lay off and fire (selectively) 20% of the state work force (starting with the Dept of Public Safety and the state police)and many of the other layabouts that have "make believe jobs" on the taxpayers dime ie half of the employees in the state house. Until this state makes tough choices and hard cuts, I hope we head down the same road as California: bankruptcy and/or send Barack Obama the bill and let NH, RI, CT, and NY pay our bills. Liberals want "stuff" so let the liberals fund the "stuff".
$quot;The sky is falling! The sky is FALLING!$quot;
Right. Kill every one of 'em. Bang.
Except, what this does, is maybe add 10-20 cents to my $10 lunch in downtown Lowell.
NH has an 8% meals tax, BTW.
20 cents will not stop me from buying my lunch. Neither will $1 on a $50 meal. If I have $50 to go out to dinner, I have another $1.
Go hype doom somewhere where people actually buy it...
Smart
Nice to see they got one right.
Complaints
The complaints I have heard oen this -- one printed today from the Massachusetts Municipal Association -- is that this will "create serious disparities between municipalities based on the number of restaurants and hotels within their borders".
Funny how no one is complaining about the disparities in property values, concentration of poverty, etc.
Cities and towns should be able to raise revenue according to their strengths. Every city and town is different. We currently have only one way to raise revenue -- the property tax -- which makes some communities appear as "wealthy" and others as "poor". This is only because of the constraints that the state puts on communities -- if the state changed the rules so that revenues could only come from sales tax and not property tax, a lot of "wealthy" bedroom communities would suddenly find themselves with tin cups in their hands.
Sufficiently broaden the ability for communities to raise revenue and you will not need as much state aid to be redistributed via the state.
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