At EconLog, I often catalogue and criticize government measures that reduce our freedom and hurt our economy. So it’s nice when I can report on a recent vote that went the other way: a vote to reduce the role of government in our economy.
On Tuesday, April 2, voters in Jackson County, Missouri voted, by 58.1% to 41.% against extending the 3/8 percentage point sales tax that has existed for decades. According to Varad Raigonkar of Reason, extending the sales tax for 40 years would have raised about $2 billion in revenue over the next 40 years.
The money would have gone to renovate the Kansas City Royals’ baseball stadium and to build a new stadium for the recent Super Bowl winners, the Kansas City Chiefs.
In short, it would have distributed funds from people who pay the sales tax to pretty wealthy team owners. It’s possible, of course, that those funds would have caused prices of tickets to be lower than otherwise because now, without that tax, the two teams will need to raise money from willing payers, which might mean higher ticket prices. Even in that case, though, the funds would go to the relatively wealthy. A high percent of people who pay the current ticket prices are almost certainly relatively wealthy.
Thus the title of this post. A majority of the voters voted against redistributing wealth upward.
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