Taxing Your Underpants

Although they pledge to be crusading for the middle class and looking to stick it to “millionaires” who need to pay their “fair share,” Connecticut’s ruling supermajority Democrats in the General Assembly voted to extinguish the exemption from the income tax on clothing purchases of less than $50, sticking it directly to the middle class.

Last week, Democrats in the legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee voted in favor of dropping the exemption, and in favor of slapping the sales tax on middle class Connecticut.

After all, how many clothing items under the price of $50 are wealthy people buying? Rich people don’t buy twelve-packs of tightie whitey underpants, value packs of tube socks, or any of the clothes off the rack in a T.J. Maxx. But under this Democratic proposal, the people that do buy those clothes would now pay a 6% sales tax.

Constantly arguing their version of a “progressive” taxation, this proposal is anything but that. If they were truly fighting for the middle class, and believed the philosophy they espouse, they would jack the sales tax up on clothing over $50 instead of eliminate the exemption. The truly wealthy already pay the sales tax on almost all of their clothing items because they buy expensive clothes.

Incidentally, our $50 exemption isn’t all that magnificent to begin with. According to the New Haven Register, New York has an exemption for clothing under $110, liberal Massachusetts exempts clothing under $175, and Rhode Island doesn’t have any sales tax on clothing and footwear at all. And yet, here comes our supermajority putting the pinch on your skivvies.

There is, of course, Connecticut’s once-a-year tax holiday in August that exempts purchases under $300 in anticipation of back-to-school needs. You can probably count on that being axed too.

What could their motive be? Well, the under-reported truth is that your lawmakers in Hartford want to be able to tax your Internet purchases. Federal law prevents the legislature from taxing things you buy on the Internet as a Connecticut resident when there are such exemptions in place.

In other words, they are implementing a tax increase to allow them to implement another tax increase. That is what you get with a liberal supermajority. Their view of taxes and spending should be enough to make a mess in your overtaxed drawers.