Recently, Pennies for Progress, the group advocating a sales tax hike in Georgetown County, filed its initial report with the State Ethics Commission. The report disclosed that three corporations have provided all the funding for Pennies for Progress. The three corporations are Mead & Hunt Inc, Thomas and Hutton Engineering and Friends of the Georgetown Library Inc.
Mead & Hunt Inc is an architectural and engineering firm with more than 20 offices and a nationwide service area. Thomas and Hutton Engineering provides engineering, planning and consulting services from offices in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Friends of the Georgetown Library Inc is a public charity.
Each of these corporations has a vested interest in increasing the sales tax in Georgetown County. Mead & Hunt Inc and Thomas and Hutton Engineering want to curry favor with Georgetown County officials and to get a slice of the $40 million of new capital spending. Friends of the Georgetown Library Inc want Georgetown County to spend over $11 million building new libraries.
Of course, these three corporations would pay little or none of the new sales tax. Corporations generally don’t pay sales tax.
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Also, these three corporations would pay little or none of the costs of operating and maintaining the new capital projects. These corporations don’t pay property taxes in Georgetown County.
So when you see advertisements by Pennies for Progress asking you to vote for the sales tax hike, remember that the corporations that paid for the advertisements are not going pay the tax. They want you to pay the tax.
The writer lives in Georgetown.
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