New porn sales tax — the right thing to do
My wife is a pediatrician who practices medicine in the Lowcountry. She also serves on the executive committee of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Recently, the chapter asked her to call on legislators to support the proposal which called for the imposition of a new $0.50 sales tax on the sale of each pack of cigarettes in the state — and to ask them to consider raising this amount to $0.75 per pack.
As a Republican, I’m not generally fond of these types of proposals, and I have even published a letter in The Post and Courier which argued against Gov. Sanford’s previously-stated position that this is a worthwhile concept. I believe this reduces the medical community’s incentives for advocating healthy lifestyles and healthy consumption, something which cigarette smoking is not. Still, when my wife asked me for the personal numbers of some of my Republican friends serving in the legislature, I obliged her request, suggesting she should first call Larry Grooms, who represents us in the State Senate, to ask about his perspective on the proposal.
After our discussion with Larry, who has owned sundry stores in Berkeley County which retail products like cigarettes, I came up with an idea regarding a way the legislature could address some of the state’s tax revenue shortfalls in a manner that is largely consistent with raising taxes on the sales of packs of cigarettes to generate funding for child health care needs in the state:
Impose new taxes on the retail sales of so-called “adult entertainment” media (i.e. magazines, videos, memberships in online adult sites, etc.).
More specifically: Implement an additional $0.75 sales tax on the sale of each adult magazine by a South Caroline-based retailer, the sale of every adult film by a South Carolina-based retailer, and the sale of each membership in an online adult site to a person living in South Carolina.
As a close observer of state politics I am confident that if the funds collected by this tax were used to further supplement child health care needs across the state exclusively, virtually no one in the State House of Representatives or the State Senate will stand in the way of any legislator who decides to champion this concept by introducing a bill to propose this measure.
This would be the right thing to do — not to mention an example of policy entrepreneurship that will garner a great deal of national media attention for anyone serving in the South Carolina State House. Not that our elected officials think in those terms.
Michael S. Smith II
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