They've got the receipts
A big government idea for food taxes
Instead of repealing Idaho’s morally dubious tax on food, crafty state lawmakers have come up with an even worse option: House Bill 61 would raise the grocery tax credit from $120 to $155, which is true-to-form for a Legislature that still wants to tax people on the food they need to live so that government operations benefit from the consistency of people not wanting to starve to death plus the inflationary effects of groceries costing more. Great for the state bureaucracy, bad for you.
But what makes House Bill 61 particularly odious is the provision that would let taxpayers submit their grocery receipts for the supposed benefit a tax credit of up to $250. In other words, when the taxpayer itemizes and provides the state tax authorities with proof of purchases via copies of their receipts, the credit would net the taxpayer $95 more than the standard $155 grocery tax credit.
The bill’s fiscal impact statement doesn’t mention it, so I’ll just drop it here: Every single time the government makes the tax code more complicated, as is proposed here, it requires more government auditors, more of their time, or both.
Someone at the state tax commission is going to need to examine receipts (or some portion of the receipts submitted) to make sure they conform to the tax code’s food tax credit requirements. Namely, House Bill 61 would follow the federal food stamp definitions but would exclude from the tax credit the purchase of candy and sodas when those products are itemized.
Are Idaho tax auditors going to need to go through the process of tallying up Taxpayer Jim’s purchases of Diet Pepsi and M&Ms to determine whether they’ve properly claimed the larger tax credit? Probably at least some number of taxpayers are going to go through the ordeal of collecting and totaling receipts to give to the government, and then some percentage of those receipts will need to be examined for consistency with the state’s tax law.
Most people who go to a Costco, Walmart, or Sam’s Club to purchase food don’t buy groceries and non-grocery items in separate trips, so now taxpayers wanting to claim the additional credit would need to expose their other purchases — tires, clothing, furniture, and so forth — to the government for no good reason. It’s another way for the state to invade your privacy.
But these are the details of policy that Idaho lawmakers are reluctant to talk about. They’d rather move forward on a “tax cut” and dare their colleagues to vote against it, the long-term consequences — or the easier alternatives of not taxing food as other state residents are being exposed to in increasing numbers — be damned.