Taxing What Has Already Been Taxed
Florida has an “Intangibles Tax”. This is a tax on stocks and bonds that is similar to a property tax. The way the exemptions are structured you aren’t subject to the tax unless your portfolio is worth in excess of a million dollars for an individual. The rate, like property taxes, is in mills, i.e. thousandths of dollars or tenths of cents.
The Republicans are planning to eliminate this tax, while the Democrats have proposed reducing the sales tax rate if the state is so overburdened with money.
The claim is that the Intangibles Tax is on money that has already been taxed. Sorry, but the Federal income tax means that all our money is already taxed and in many cases the sales tax is collected on taxes. More than half of the price of gasoline or cigarettes is taxes, so more than half of the sales tax collected is based on taxing taxes. If gasoline is priced at a dollar a gallon, it costs $2 with the Federal and state taxes. The sales tax in Florida is 6%, so half of the 12¢ you pay in sales tax is actually on tax.
The transfer of the burden for government to the “Third Estate” continues. Oh, you can ask students in the Florida university system, or those people forced by private insurance companies into the state’s insurer of last resort, or the local governments waiting to be reimbursed for hurricane expenses if the state is overburdened with money. None of these groups seem to believe that the state has too much money.
