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What a great outcome for South Dakota! We are preserving the majority of our state’s values!

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Hmmm, what are the state's values? The only ballot measure that passed (we didn’t even agree that gender neutral language in the state’s constitution was a good thing— it’s a man’s world little girl!) was to put in place a work requirement for medicaid recipients—the poorest of the poor (a family of four can’t make more than $43,056, a little over $10,000 a year per person—$27 dollars a day to cover all your living expenses, housing, food, transportation, health care, insurance), pregnant women, newborns, children, the disabled, the blind . . . if they are able-bodied (who cares if they are mentally ill), get to work!

Nothing worse than these free loaders living the high life with free medical care! We cannot afford these entitlements—we of course can afford to cut the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%. We have to do everything we can to reduce the onerous burden on corporations or they won’t continue to provide these able-bodied medicaid recipients with such good minimum wage jobs! They’ll go belly up! We must save them! Okay, though I know facts don’t matter; let me close with a few facts.

America’s largest, most consistently profitable corporations saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent after the Trump tax law went into effect in 2018. The effective tax rate is important, because though the corporate tax rate is 21%, most corporations pay far less.

The 296 largest and most consistently profitable U.S. corporations paid $240 billion less in taxes from 2018 to 2021 than if they had continued to pay the effective rates they’d paid before the Trump tax law.

While profits for the largest, continuously profitable U.S. corporations rose by 44 percent after passage of the Trump tax law, their federal tax bills dropped by 16 percent (just think if their taxes had remained the same, they might have had profits of only 28% over the same time period—a disaster).

The number of these corporations paying tax rates of less than 10 percent increased from 56 to 95 after the Trump tax law went into effect.

Many of the largest and most well-known corporations in the country — including Walmart, Verizon, Disney, and Meta — among the most able to pay taxes had the largest tax reductions after the Trump tax law went into effect.

Is it any wonder that these corporations poured money into electing politicians who support continuing and expanding these tax cuts?

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Your first line is misleading. It should read South Dakotans will stay pay taxes on consumable goods, as will tourists and others from out of state who spend a good chunk of money in South Dakota.

(Think of all the people from Minnesota and Iowa who do their shopping in Sioux Falls. Or those from Wyoming who do their shopping in Rapid City)

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