Ve Haf Vays of Making You Shop

Oneida County's website has an FAQ designed to crush your hopes of fighting the tax hike and explains why you should be happy to fork over the money you can't afford to spend so that deadbeats on medicaid can get the medical care you can't afford.

Among the laughable items:

What is exempt?

Food, food products, beverages, dietary foods, prescription and non-prescription drugs, medical equipment and supplies, newspapers, magazines and other periodicals, prosthetic aids, hearing aids, eyeglasses, and legal and medical services.

It's good to know that all the medical stuff that created this budget disaster in the first place is also tax exempt.

What’s the impact on other purchases?

Every time sales taxes go up in an area, there are comments that changes in shopping patterns will follow. When the sales tax was imposed in 1982 and increased in 1992, those same predictions were made, but there is no statistics to support those claims.

I imagine it's hard to gather statistics when the population has fallen so much in the last decade or two. I wonder if that has anything to do with the tax increases. This also kind of hurts the arguement that this is a temporary tax increase.

What does this mean to our local stores?

Local retailers who have endured over the years provide high quality and superior service. The value a locally owned retailer provides is far beyond the price of any single item. Also, our local retailers are the ones who give our youth their first work experience, who provide long-time employment and who give back to the community.

Tell that to James Gillette. He did all that and people in Rome went to Wal-Mart instead. The Oneida one in Madison County isn't that far away.

What about sales tax-free weeks?

Oneida County plans to participate in every possible sales tax free week. The number and timing of those weeks is determined at the state level.

I'd like to see that, considering Oneida County is notorious for not participating in those programs.

I have some more stuff tomorrow about the claims of the cost effectiveness of county hopping.