SC Fair Tax - Lt Gov (candidate) Bill Conner

We are facing near record unemployment in our state right now.
The jobless rate has fallen by nearly a point from its zenith,
but remains far too high. The reason for this is clear - we
have grown government to unsustainable levels while taxing
businesses out of our state, or worse, out of existence.

Texas has shown us the way out of this mess. Our beaches are
better than Texas. Our wetlands are more beautiful. Our golf
courses are better. Our places to hunt and fish are better
than Texas. South Carolina is simply a better place to live
than Texas.

But, Texas has no personal or corporate income tax. As a
result, businesses have flocked there rather than here. What
do those businesses do? Create jobs - Texas has about half of
our unemployment rate at this writing.

We know what happens when you tax something - you get less of
it. That's why the legislature just passed an increase in
the cigarette tax; it's not about how much money they make on
the tax hike, it's about how many fewer people smoke as a
result of it. So why are we surprised when a state like ours
that taxes work winds up with fewer workers who have jobs?

So what should a state with an ailing economy do to give it
a permanent boost? Let's end the South Carolina personal and
corporate income tax.

Now, some say that would be difficult to impossible from a
budget standpoint. Where would we "replace" $3B in revenues
that the state receives from income tax? First, that question
ignores the reality of what happens in the economy when you
stop taxing work. If every small business in South Carolina
had that money back in the bank account instead of in the tax
revenue account, we'd be able to create so many more jobs that
sales tax revenues would naturally increase. That doesn't even
count the increase from enforcement: with the FairTax
everybody pays - illegal immigrants, underground economies, no
one is exempt.

Unfortunately, the budget writers in the Legislature don't
account for that sort of thing using their static budget
models, so we'll have to "find a way to pay" to eliminate the
income tax. This is easy - our state currently boasts $3.1B
in sales tax exemptions: on groceries, Thanksgiving weekend
purchases, back to school supplies, that sort of thing. If
we simply ended the sales tax exemptions, we could eliminate
corporate and personal income tax tomorrow.

That's what I support. An overhaul of our tax system that
ends corporate and personal income tax and replaces it with
sales taxes.