Bredesen calls food tax cut proposal brutal ploy

The measure co-sponsored by all 17 Republicans in the Senate and 20 Republicans in the House, would drop the state’s 6 percent food tax by half a percentage point each year until it is eliminated in the budget year beginning in 2018.

“This tax cut proposal is brutal,” Bredesen said in a speech to the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce in Nashville. “This is the worst kind of Washington, D.C., budgeting that I have seen in my years as governor. It would knock a hole in our budget and plunge the state into fiscal crisis.

“A lot of people are supporting it because they think it will mess up the economics of the state and we will have to go back to an income tax consideration. We don’t need to resurrect that issue.”

An income tax proposal spearheaded by then-Gov. Don Sundquist, Bredesen’s Republican predecessor, failed after years of emotional debate.

House Minority Leader Jason Mumpower said Bredesen is “out of touch” with Tennesseans who want to see a reduction in the food tax.

“To say that it has anything to do with an income tax is ludicrous,” said Mumpower, R-Bristol and a co-sponsor of the tax cut measure.

Mumpower said that Bredesen’s own proposal to increase cigarette taxes to pay for education funding might lead to future calls for an income tax because of declining cigarette sales

“An income tax might be something he has up his sleeve,” Mumpower said.

The Legislature’s Fiscal Review Committee estimates that losses in state food tax collections would be $3.6 billion over the next 12 years and $612 million for every year after that.

The tax reduction would also lead local governments to lose $175 million over the first dozen years, and another $29 million for each subsequent year, according to the committee’s analysis.

“It’s just a terrible, terrible idea,” Bredesen said.