Proposed tax on newspapers must be stricken
It is important to raise your glass in support of honorable ideas that circulate the General Assembly.
Further, it is important to realize that passage of legislation is difficult by design. In part of the reconsumption of bills, things get added and subtracted through compromise or political force.
When I recently read state Rep. Tim Mahoney’s letter to the editor, I realized this may be what is happening on The Property Tax Independence Act HB 1776.
Mr. Mahoney held this bill out as tax reform for property owners to finance schools, and that is true. I agree with Mr. Mahoney, property tax associated with public schools is needed from private individuals, however, in passing he said the sales tax should be extended to include newspapers, which I do not agree with. Would Mr. Mahoney and the General Assembly support a tax on guns or voting at the polls? The impairment of liberty should never be a passing thought.
In that thought was the revelation that some of the members of the House think of newspapers as paper instead of news. I find the irony in the name and number of the bill to be revolting. The Property Tax Independence Act HB 1776, while artfully playing on every American’s love of independence, taxes newspapers. What the General Assembly should realize is the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 occurred in response to the Stamp Act, a law that taxed newspapers.
Newspapers are a shield of the public. Newspapers are what helped the public understand what members of the General Assembly had done to its public during the midnight pay raise and Bonusgate.
Newspapers, while their collective ideas are as different as those who write them, are the prime defense from corruption in our government. Newspapers are the light that scatter the cockroaches that, from time to time, infect our governments at all levels.
While I may not have case law to support it, I certainly do have natural law, ethical, and political grounds to call a tax on newspapers unconstitutional and misguided at best. A free press is at the heart of every free society. After all, Mr. Mahoney used the free press to articulate his reasons to support taxing it.
At a point when fewer people turn out to vote, the average voting age continues to climb with fewer new voters, a new law hampers poor, elderly and disadvantaged from voting, leaders in the General Assembly would make it more difficult to allow a independent third party to look into the actions of government.
Real independence is a free press. Which is why I unflinchingly reject The Property Tax Independence Act HB 1776’s tax on the free press as an oblique attack on the public’s liberty.
“The basis of our government’s being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” -Thomas Jefferson
Travis P. Barkley is a resident of Greensboro.