So reports the Republic. The mayor calls it a “emergency economic surcharge.”

The city is facing another huge budget gap—approaching $100 million, after the council already cut more than $250 million this year.

A good part of the story is given over to Republican officials nattering on against the idea of raising taxes.

No one says the what to me is the most salient aspect of the plan—that sales taxes are the most regressive type of levy, one that places a disproportionate burden on the poor and working class.

The coverage was similarly incomplete when the governor proposed her sales-tax plan during the state’s budget crisis this summer.

This is why sales taxes are unfair:

The poor and working class spend most of their income each year. Rent comes first, of course, and then after that, by definition, the vast majority of their money is spent on necessities—food, clothes for the kids, etc.

I say “by definition” because if you’re not spending what money you have on necessities, then you have discretionary income. Which means you’re probably middle class. Even if you exempt some necessities, the fact remains that poorer people spend all their money each year.

Every percentage increase in the sales tax creates a corresponding percentage decrease in the living standards of a poor or working-class family.

A one-percent tax on food is one percent less food for your family. And with an 8 percent sales tax already in effect in Phoenix, that’s a huge piece of a working family’s income.

Again, by definition, your higher-income families spend money on a lot of other things, things you wouldn’t call necessities. They save and invest relatively large percentages as well.

And let’s remember that the state’s fat cats have been doing swell the last few years, surfing a wave of real estate money and parading around in their tubby SUVs. (They also got an enormous slate of tax cuts from the Bush administration earlier this decade, a gift that keeps on giving, year after year*.)

Now, you don’t have to agree with this contention, though it is based on facts, is a widely accepted analysis of taxation, and contains a strong moral component.

But shouldn’t it be part of the debate? Couldn’t the Republic at least have mentioned it?

  • From the NYT:
Those cuts will have saved individuals, and cost the government, $2.34 trillion, according to calculations the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute, made for The New York Times. The Bush and Obama administrations have called the center’s past calculations reliable. Interest on the money borrowed to finance those tax cuts equals a month worth of income taxes paid to the government by individuals.

Emphasis added. In other words, almost a tenth of the money you pay the U.S. government each year goes to pay off merely the interest of the Bush tax cuts to rich folks.