Rep. Reginald Bolding on the harm of a flat tax

It’s a busy time at the state capitol as lawmakers work on a proposed budget that would, most notably, implement a flat tax that would cut income taxes – and corresponding state revenue – by over a billion dollars. We got an update from the house minority leader, Reginald Bolding, in our weekly legislative update.

We asked Bolding if he were surprised that the prosed bill SB1713 got voted down when it included early ballots would have to have an affidavit or show the last four digits of your social security number or a voter registration with your birth date.

Bolding explained that the ability for someone to forget to put all of the numbers down or miswrite a number would then make your ballet no longer qualify.

“The reality is that this is the legislature going a little too far but so enough that they didn’t even realize that they didn’t even have their members,” Bolding said.

Bolding believes that the 1713 bill won’t come back.

We then asked Bolding about the flat tax proposal.

“I can tell you that 80% of Arizona voters, Arizona citizens that pay income tax, this would not be a good idea for them,” Bolding said.

Bolding proceeded to explain, “this would cause cities to have up to 50% or 60% cuts to their budgets based on the revenue they would not receive because of this flat tax.”

Finally, we asked him what he makes of what’s happening regarding republican lawmakers pushing for the attorney general to take over many of the duties that the secretary of state had.

Bolding explained that Arizona is starting to become more like Wisconsin when they elected a Democratic governor. The legislature voted to take away almost all of the power from the governor.