Consumers and taxpayers in California will have a little extra reason to celebrate over the 4th of July holiday. Thanks to fast action by the legislature, late last week, Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed a bill prohibiting local jurisdictions from imposing regressive taxes on groceries for 12 years. This is an important step forward for protecting Californians from harmful taxes at the local level.
California’s new law ensures consumers face an equal level of food taxation wherever they go grocery shopping in the state. Furthermore, residents can now go to their local supermarket without fear that politicians will target their favorite cereal, meat, fruit juice, or any other food product with higher tax.
While this law does not reverse Berkeley, Oakland, or San Francisco’s targeted tax on some beverage products, it does prevent proposals for grocery taxes currently being considered in four other California jurisdictions from becoming law. NTU strongly opposes unfair grocery taxes because they place an unnecessary burden on lower-income people, depress sales for small businesses, and puts government between consumers and free choice.
California now joins Arizona and Michigan as the latest state to ban grocery taxes. NTU was pleased to endorse legislation in Pennsylvania that would ban grocery taxes in the Keystone State and we look forward to working with lawmakers to ensure its passage. This November, voters in Oregon and Washington State will vote on ballot initiatives prohibiting state and local governments from enacting taxes on groceries.
NTU strongly supported California’s Proposition 218, the 1996 ballot measure that gave citizens a right to vote on many local tax hikes. We also supported Proposition 26, the 2010 measure that subjected fees to the same ⅔ “supermajority” vote requirement of the state legislature that the landmark Proposition 13 set for taxes. Although a 2018 initiative campaign to qualify a ⅔ supermajority safeguard for local sales tax hikes has now been suspended, consumers, small businesses, and workers should still take comfort in the fact that one of life’s biggest necessities will be protected from predatory local taxes.