As for the joker who thought it was no big deal to sign a tax form affirming you were going to consume the pumpkin you were buying to get a tax exemption, WHAT THE &#$% BUSINESS IS IT OF THE GOVERNMENT WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO DO WITH YOUR PUMPKIN!? BACK OFF, ARROGANT BUREAUCRATS. YOU WORK FOR US. WE DON’T HAVE TO REPORT AND JUSTIFY EVERY &*@$ DETAIL OF OUR LIVES TO YOU.

There, I feel better now. Isn’t it funny that people who would complain the Patriot Act is trashing our rights have no problem with the government demanding we account to it for our vegetable use. Sheesh!

Iowa is a liberal state that tends to be tax and form happy. It’s one of the few states that demanded that military members serving outside Iowa pay state income tax. That’s why Iowa boys like me turned Texan as soon as we were assigned to a base there. Lots of Air Force guys become Texan or Floridian citizens because they have no state tax.

Iowa used to sell all liquor in state liquor stores which were a model of government incompetence. Customers would read a board with all the liquor products on it, write down their order, and get in line to give it to the clerk. The clerk would check it for correctness, sign off on it, and give it back to you. Then you got in another line to give it to a clerk who picked your order. The stock was all behind the long desk, off limits to customers. Then you took your order to the cashier who rang it up.

The legistors came up with the idea of exempting food from sales tax to keep lower income people from paying a high percentage of their meager incomes on taxes just to feed their families. (This exemption is fairly new here in Wyoming. And there are a few states that still tax food, pumpkins included.)

It was a bureaucrat at the Dept of Revenue that decided that pumpkins weren’t food and should be taxed.

It’s nice to see the governor telling them otherwise. Even though it took a public/blog firestorm to convince him.

And christmas trees are already subject to sales tax, assuming that you live in a state that has a sales tax (Montana is the only one I can think of that dosn’t have a sales tax.)

Watch this come back next year like a bad burrito.

So, I guess Iowa will still get the tax revenue it generated.

Taxing pumpkins. How stupid can elected officials be? No. You don’t have to answer that. As was noted earlier in the comments, they have too much time on their hands.

On November 1st, 2007 at 12:58 pm, gayle said:
Just wait.

Christmas trees will be next.

Ahhhh…..gayle,
If you’re chowing down on a Christmas Tree com Dec 25, please don’t invite me for dinner. My doctor says I need some ruffage, but there’s such a thing as taking things too far. I’ll stick with turkey.

How in the world does some of this ____ get passed in the first place? Don’t these people READ these things before they sign off on them? Apparently not.

Come now, you know liberals will keep burn the midnight oil coming up with tax schemes to part us from our money for them to throw at their constiuency.

This one was just too funny to the blogosphere and talk radio to ignore. Once exposed, they had to retreat.

It was an assinine tax for the Dems to come with in the first place, but then what is the party symbol after all?

Probably figured the revenue from a Pumpkin tax just wasn’t worth the humiliation of being mocked:)