Sales tax holiday boondoggle

Your article titled "Area retailers expecting big weekend because of sales tax holiday" helps readers participate in the sales tax holiday when it should be warning them about the long-term consequences of this boondoggle.

A three-day sales tax holiday for selected items does nothing to provide relief to low-income taxpayers during the other 362 days of the year. In the long run, sales tax holidays leave an unfair tax system basically unchanged. It's worth noting that wealthy families benefit from the holiday too and they have an even greater ability to shift their spending to take advantage of the tax break.

Sales tax holidays are also costly. Missouri can ill afford to stop collecting taxes, even for just a couple of days. Revenue lost through sales tax holidays will ultimately have to be made up somewhere else, either through painful spending cuts or increasing other taxes.

Well-intentioned policymakers need to understand that sales tax holidays are simply too insignificant, poorly targeted and too temporary to meaningfully change the regressive nature of a state's tax system. If they really want to help Missourians' bottom lines, they should work to make the state's tax structure more fair permanently.

KELLY DAVIS, Midwest director, Institute on

Taxation and Economic Policy, Whitewater, Wis.