About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 Andrew Chamberlain & Gerald Prante, Who Will Pay Taxes for Tennessee Governor's Schools First Initiative, and Who Will Receive the Spending 1 (2007)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/ffiexz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: r:OuUNNDAT10N. April 18, 2007 Who Will Pay Taxes for Tennessee Governor's Schools First Initiative, and Who Will Receive the Spending? by Andrew Chamberlain and Gerald Prante Fiscal Fact No. 84 Introduction In his most recent State of the State Address, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen proposed a 40-cent increase in the state's cigarette tax to fund an education initiative known as Schools First. The plan consists of $219.6 million of new spending on a broad array of education, agriculture and smoking cessation programs.' To fund the spending, the Governor has proposed increasing the state's cigarette tax from 20 to 60 cents per pack, which is estimated to raise roughly 96 percent of the required $219.6 million for the plan.2 While the Governor's plan to boost education spending may be well intended, by funding the Schools First initiative through tobacco taxes rather than general sales taxes, it will make low-income households in Tennessee much worse off that they could otherwise be. Because the Governor's proposal relies almost entirely on cigarette tax revenue, at least three components of the plan have the perverse effect of redistributing millions of dollars from low-income to upper-income households in the state of Tennessee. As explained below, this result could largely be avoided by funding the proposal through general sales taxes rather than regressive cigarette excise taxes.3 The Schools First Initiative The revenue and spending items that make up Gov. Bredesen's Schools First initiative are listed in Table 1, along with their 2007-2008 budget amounts. Of the $219.6 million of revenue from the proposed cigarette tax increase, roughly 90 percent is targeted at various education programs, while the remaining 10 percent is divided between smoking prevention programs and farm programs.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most