Income Tax Ban considered in next 24 hours. Please speak out!

The Senate Judicary and House Finance Committees will consider the resolution today, April 26, and tomorrow, April 27. Please contact them to let them know we cannot permanently remove this revenue option - it would lock TN's highest sales tax in the nation into the Constitution, maintain wealth disparity, and permanently require those with the least amount of income to pay 3 times what the wealthy pay in taxes. The sales tax will also never provide enough revenue to fund the state's needs, keeping TN perpetually behind the rest of the nation in educational attainment, public safety, and access to affordable health care. Unacceptable!!

House Finance, Ways and Means Committee members
Senate Judiciary Committee members

Chattanooga's Times Free Press speaks out against an income tax ban in this article:

"Banning an income tax. The state Senate has already passed legislation to amend the state constitution to ban creation of a general state income tax. Republicans encountered a hiccup in a similar bill in the House when former House Speaker, Jimmy Naifeh, a Democrat, successfully urged House Republicans to accept an amendment also banning an increase in the state sales tax. The bill is now properly stuck on the challenge of fairness and fiscal vision.
The bill should fail. Republicans know the sales tax is cruelly regressive because wage earners typically must spend all their earnings on goods subject to the sales tax. Republicans also know a progressive income tax would help shift the weight of state taxes to the very wealthy, who save most of their money and thus can avoid spending as large a share of their income on sales taxes as ordinary workers must spend.
Banning the income tax would eliminate the only fair alternative to lowering the burdensome sales tax on ordinary Tennesseans. That would hobble the prospect of tax fairness for average Tennesseans for a long time. For fairness, the tax system should be reversed. It hasn’t been, because middle-class Tennesseans have swallowed the Republican Kool-Aid against an income tax, while they get the shaft on the sales tax. One day they will see the light. The income tax should remain available for that day.