Josh Barro, Columnist

Bobby Jindal’s Tax Failure

A tax swap could be good for Louisiana, but Bobby Jindal was seeking the wrong one.

April 9, 2013 at 5:21 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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This week, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal announced that he is backing off his signature plan to repeal his state's income tax and replace it by raising the sales-tax rate and expanding the sales tax to more items. This is not surprising.

In the last 50 years, exactly one U.S. state has repealed a major (personal income, general sales or property) tax: Alaska, following the discovery of massive oil deposits. If you don't find the equivalent of the North Slope in your state, you shouldn't expect to get rid of a major tax.