Georgia's Brilliant Plan to Dump The Tax-Free Weekend
Georgia will not be holding its tax-free weekend this August. WRDW has a crying Oprah GIF. The Macon Telegraph uses phrases like “Georgia shoppers will miss out” and “legislators shut down the sales tax-free weekend.” But is that really the case, or is this a surprisingly shrewd move from the Gold Dome?
The annual tax-free weekend started as a good idea, as most things do, where parents and teachers could purchase items for educational purposes without tax for one weekend a year in the summer as they planned for the upcoming school year. I taught ninth grade during the 2000-2001 school year, and the summer of 2000 was the first time the tax holiday was offered in Georgia, as well as in about 20 other states. I was thrilled, given that I was given one pack of college-ruled paper, two packs of pens, a pack of chalk, and a stapler for my room for the entire year. Also, ironically, I had a white board in my room, not a chalkboard.
You’d better believe I bought bulletin board decorations, posters, books for a small lending library, dry erase markers, pencils, erasers, and other office essentials during that weekend.
The idea was that teachers and parents would increase consumption, and therefore spend more money, jogging the economy. What the Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University has found over the past decade and a half, however, is that people don’t increase their spending, but rather they hold off on making purchases until the tax free weekend, costing the state and localities between $36 million and $50 million annually. That is surely what I did. I’d have had to buy all of that stuff anyway. (Okay, “have had” is probably incorrect, but I would have.) This means that the weekend wasn’t a great boon for the state or retailers. But consumers got a break from the taxes, so that was a reduction of the out-of-pocket cost, right?
Read more: https://www.georgiapol.com/2017/06/30/georgias-brilliant-plan-dump-tax-free-weekends/