Courier Press on Tax Amnesty

Jennifer Whitson, for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article entitled Verdict still out on tax amnesty. The article has Republicans and Democrats trying to position themselves on the state’s tax amnesty problems. Democrats: ‘It encourages scofflaws, it was too expensive, and it didn’t work that well.’; Republicans: ‘Who cares how we get the money, getting the money is the important part and it worked spectacularly.’

We’ll see. Ms. Whitson reports that the normal collections for the Dept. of Revenue was down $12 million right before the amnesty. Representative Bauer suggests that, when analyzing the effectiveness of the program, that $12 million ought to be taken off the bottom line since it’s “money we would have collected anyway.”