Responses on the Montana Sales Tax

My thoughts on a Montana sales tax brought replies within hours. Thanks much for the interest.

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Carol from Billings gave her insight on this in an email:

Hey Travis,
Please get together with Paul from the Flakes (on sister station Cat Country 102.9) and start a movement to REPLACE property taxes with a sales tax.
We tried your idea: added up our purchases (a lot) last year, and then calculated total at a 4% tax. Like yours, ours was half of our property tax.
Law makers and people who get their salaries from taxpayers must love the “we can’t have a sales tax in Montana!” crowd. They can take money from us just by saying our property values have gone up.
So what? That means we have to pay more in taxes even though we haven’t done any improvements or sold our house? Insanity that we let this continue.
The government will fight this because it might mean they would have to quit spending or economize like ordinary people.
Thank you for keeping this in the forefront of people’s minds!
Let’s get a petition going to send to the Governor’s commission.

Todd in Whitefish threw in his thoughts on tax and visitors to this wonderful state.

I was born in MT, but I have lived in TX and KS.

We have millions of people visiting our state every year and we do not tax them to be here at all (Whitefish and a couple other towns have a city sales tax).

I would certainly be ok with a small sales tax if my property taxes were lesser than now. It is impossible to get rid of a tax. Everyone pays the sales tax, stop with the complexities of exceptions.

In Whitefish, we have tax paid for wonderful infrastructure. It works for us with the high count of visitors. It would help the rest of the state too if we had a state sales tax.

Mrs. C in Billings gave her experience from other state in a quick app message:

Re: the sales tax vs property tax. I have lived out of state a couple times. In all the times I have encountered sales tax, there have been exclusions. For instance potato chips were taxed, potatoes were not. I would support it, but only if property tax was done away with at the time of implementation.