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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 27, 1992                   TAG: 9202270477
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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TAX MODESTY NOT EXACTLY KILLING PROPOSALS

HOW MODEST are the various General Assembly tax proposals that, if not dead, are on death's door?

The Senate's increase in the tax on joint income above $100,000 would raise $50 million annually in a $14-billion-a-year budget. Weep not for a $135,000-a-year couple with exemptions and deductions totaling $35,000; for them, there'd be no increase. A $200,000-a-year couple with exemptions and deductions totaling $50,000 would hardly go from riches to rags; for them, the tax increase would be $250.

The House's sales-tax proposal would do better, raising more than $200 million per year. But a lot of that would go for roads, for which there are more appropriate ways of raising money. And it isn't exactly an increase from 4.5 cents to 5 cents that's proposed. Rather, the proposal is for a referendum on the question. Never mind whose job it is to raise taxes.

More clearly dead - the metaphor is apt on this point - are proposals to raise the cigarette tax by even so much as a penny a pack. Not for Virginia to follow the lead of that great tobacco-bashing state, North Carolina, which recently increased its cigarette tax.

Virginia's 2.5 cent-per-pack excise tax compares with a national average above 20 cents. As any thoughts of adjustment are killed, so too are 7,000 Virginians. Annually. By smoking. And from the state economy, tobacco's effects drain $1.6 billion every year in medical bills and lost productivity.

That's not a modest impact.

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