By forcing employers to pay higher wages for entry-level jobs, Boston's City Council is also encouraging them to only hire applicants with the skill levels needed to match those wages. No amount of political grandstanding is going to repeal that economic law.
People on the other side of the issue, I understand where they're coming from. They want their product funded. But my industry is paying the tax to some degree. That's the bottom line. Admittedly, some of the tax is passed on, but my restaurant and food service operators are paying some of this tax out of their own pocket.
We're funding a program that has a lot of merit. But if it's so important, then everyone should be taxed, not just us.
I'm not saying restaurants are going out of business because of the soda tax. I'm saying it cuts into my profits.
The other thing that I want to mention by way of example, which is-which will, I am sure, be discussed by others in the industry, is the expansion of the Toxic Release Inventory to cover the oil and gas exploration in the production industry. The IOGCC has been opposed to this and has a committee working specifically to change the minds of the Environmental Protection Agency to do this unnecessary expansion. Not only would it unnecessarily expand the toxic release inventory to an industry that is not appropriate but it would dilute the whole good part of what the toxic release inventory is doing for the States.
Why should we be singled out more than any other product? It's totally unfair. This industry more than pays its share of taxes and understands its obligation to do that, but these special taxes are another matter.
This could be $10,000 a year on my bottom line. This is not the way to do it: Every time we need something done raise taxes. I couldn't run my business this way.
Obviously for us as an industry, it causes undue harm.
This is a huge, huge loophole. If they could raise one (food tax), they could raise another one.
Citizens against Unfair Taxes, or CUT, has held protests in several Northeast Arkansas stores during the past two weeks, handing out literature that says the tax would go into the ‘black hole of government spending.’