Georgia Republicans are crafting a plan to eliminate the state income tax. Lt. Governor Burt Jones created the Senate Special Committee on Eliminating Georgia’s Income Tax to forge ahead with his plan to eliminate the state income tax by 2032. Democratic State Senator Ed Harbison of Columbus is on the bipartisan committee.
Harbison said “We have to make sure that when we eliminate one thing we can replace it because it’s always about robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s just so much money in that $39 billion dollar budget. We’ve got $16 billion dollars of that comes from income tax. Well, if we remove it how do we replace it? We depend on sales tax. We depend on this scheme or that scheme but right now we have a horse that’s running, it works. We are attracting people to the state of Georgia, we’re growing and we’re lowering the income tax incrementally.”
State Representative Debbie Buckner has similar concerns about where money would come from to make up for the state income tax. “This is probably not a popular thing for me to say but it makes me nervous to take that large amount of money out of the budget because there are needs that need to be covered by the funds that those taxes cover,” Buckner said.
“We have made changes to the income tax law the last four years. We’ve been ratcheting down our rate and I really think that with things uncertain on the national level, not knowing how much federal money is going to be pulled because over a third of our budget is federal money so if they pull money we’ve got to make up that…there are a lot of things at play and I feel sometimes it’s better to stay in the boat and not rock it for right now. I’m not against it long term maybe or next term or whatever but I’m thinking right now there are too many uncertainties to feel comfortable making drastic changes to our tax laws,” Buckner said.
