Grocery Tax:
All the candidates say they want to get rid of the sales tax on groceries.
It’s not that simple.
I lived in a state where that was the case and worked for a grocery chain there.
First you have to define, by bar-code, what is a grocery item. Baker’s chocolate was non-taxable but Hershey’s 85% dark chocolate was taxed. If you bought a chicken, it wasn’t taxed. But if you bought a cooked chicken it was So, you have to have a group to determine what is/is not taxable. While the proposal is that the legislature will do this, soon it will be a committee to administer new items and then a paid commission to do that.
Next, you have to have an audit commission to be sure that all the stores have complied with the bar-codes determined to be taxable/non-taxable.
I believe it would be more cost effective to increase the rebate, based on a one-time statistical analysis, to reflect how much the average person spends on groceries.
To get the rebate to those who need it most, the rebate could be prepaid based on current tax information and then adjusted each year accordingly but always ahead so it would be timely.
