re: Louisiana finally has a budget surplus thanks to JBE

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A one cent tax increase that's projected to bring in 907 million dollars in a fiscal year is a large amount of money when you consider the revenues the state produces in their budget is right over 9 Billion dollars.

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that's not really useful context for sales tax breadth, which is supposed to be a measure of how much of total sales the tax actually hits

here would be one back-of-the-napkin way to get some context: say the "penny" raised $907 million. total state gdp is about $215 billion. in that case, that 1% sales tax bump apparently hits about 0.4% of total activity. and remember that this was the "clean penny", meaning all the exemptions that apply to the other 4% don't apply to it- this 1% piece is far broader than our regular sales taxes.

we also know from Tax Foundation that several states have broader sales taxes than ours. that was even true before Stelly. yet we only focus on the rate

because it's a talking point

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Do you think they should get rid of exempted items like food and drugs and make the sales tax base larger?

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yeah

ETA: another bit of context on the sales tax breadth from the Tax Exemption Budget. In FY16, $2.9B in collections. $2.7B in exemptions. LINK