Legislature passes $1B in taxes in last minutes of session

In the final 8 minutes of the special session, the Louisiana Legislature passed about $1 billion in new taxes for next year — more than $800 million of that was passed in the last 97 seconds.
Coupled with other tax hikes approved earlier in the three-week session, it means tax payers will shell out roughly $260 million in new taxes over the next three months to help close the $900 million midyear state budget shortfall and another estimated $1.2 billion next fiscal year, beginning July 1, to address a projected $2 billion deficit.
But as of Thursday, the exact numbers for how much some of the tax hikes would generate for the state were foggy because of the last-minute shuffling needed to strike a compromise on the revenue bills. State officials say the remaining budget deficit for this fiscal year could be anywhere from $30 million to $50 million, once state analysts have time to process the true costs of last minute changes.
But one thing’s for sure: Beginning April 1, taxes are going up for virtually every Louisiana resident, business and tourist.
The increase of a single penny to the state sales tax rate is the most costly increase. The state sales tax rate is going from 4 cents to 5 cents, but that’s coupled with the local sales taxes. On average, the combined local sales tax rate is about 5 percent, which means consumers will end up paying about a dime for every dollar they spend on most goods and services in Louisiana.
But in many places, like the French Quarter, Juban’s Crossing in Livingston Parish and the City of Central in East Baton Rouge, the sales tax will exceed 10 percent.
For a worker who earns between $19,000 and $37,000 a year, he or she will pay an average of $210 more dollars in sales tax dollars for a 1 percent sales tax increase, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. For someone who earns between $103,000 and $209,000 a year, the average tax change will be $567.