This seems odd, but no more odd than so much else that is going on around us.
The tanning salon tax may seem a rather small piece in the giant jigsaw of US fiscal issues, but it may prove monumental this year.
It was also only a rather small piece of the legislation in which it first arose, the Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010 and signed by President Barack Obama. Pne provision there requires that tanning salons using ultraviolet lamps pay an excise tax. The real reason for this was that the guesstimated revenue from that tax made the numbers come out right. The purported reason was that salons cause skin cancer so it is fair to use the proceeds from such a tax to support healthcare programs.
The tax, 10% of the charge, is imposed on consumers by the shops in the same manner as a state sales tax, and the salon pays it to the US Treasury quarterly.
The Trump budget bill, in the firm in which it was unveiled by the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives in mid May, included a repeal of the tanning salon tax. But this faced push-back, again because ... numbers. Deficit hawks had to prove their hawkishness somehow, and they decided to do so by restoring the tan tax.
Accordingly, the version that passed the House on May 22 left the tanning tax unrepealed. The Senate now has the whole bill under consideration, and there are important swing-vote Senators who appear ready to make the tan tax a litmus. They will vote for the bill if and only if the tanning tax is abolished. And, of course, that will create a discrepancy with the House version. The managers will try to limit the number of such discrepancies in order to ease the work of the eventual reconciliation.
Fortunately, the rest of us are heading into beach season, so we can tan without even thinking about the salons. The old-fashioned try-not-to-look-like-a-lobster-by-evening sort of way.
But to some of you the above may seem dry-as-dust. I'll go into a more controversialist mode tomorrow.
"The purported reason was that salons cause skin cancer so it is fair to use the proceeds from such a tax to support healthcare programs." That makes sense, but the amount that the tax raises is probably trivial in the scheme of things. Another reason that would make sense is that the tax could discourage people from using tanning salons, which would reduce health care costs. But it seems unlikely that people who throw away their money on tanning salons are not willing to throw away another 10 percent of it. The tax seems primarily symbolic.
ReplyDeleteYou don't state the reason for repealing the tax, but it must be because Republicans want people to get sick and die, as is evidenced by their opposition to vaccines, and during COVID, to masks and to restrictions on assembling. But, if the tax is primarily symbolic, then so would be repealing it.
I address some of these points in tomorrow's post.
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