One of the bills that did well in the state House was the bill to impose a sort of equalization tax on large entities that are multi state retailers and which pay those taxes elsewhere. The drafting legislator, an accountant by trade, had researched the issue and found that those entities, like Walmart, figure such things into the price of doing business anyhow, so basically the state was passing up on free money. The state certainly needs the money, and it was going to all be applied to education, somewhat offsetting the decline in coal severance taxes.
Well the bill may have sailed through the House but its drawn ire of those retailers and organizations that support them and is now meeting with real opposition. Over the weekend an op-ed appeared in the Tribune by figures associated with Walmart about why the bill was bad for business. Earlier an editorial ran from a outside group opposed to it. The paper has an article about the topic in today's paper.
This is a really interesting development as Wyoming's small economy, in retail terms, can't possibly hurt a nationwide retailer in any significant fashion and the underlying point of the bill, that the state is passing up on money that's basically been calculated in already, is a really good one. But the opposition is there and its even appealed to some Wyoming residents who have a strong "no tax" instinct.
Hardly debated in something like this is the fact that large out of state big box retailers like Walmart have altered the economic landscape everywhere and basically driven out of business small retailers. People as old as I am, in their mid 50s, can recall an era when there were still a lot of small retailers that sold the same sorts of things, by department, that everyone goes to Walmart and the like for now. That's not the point of the bill, but perhaps its at least worth a mention. The evolution of the American economy has been strongly in this direction on the retail end, but that hasn't necessarily helped locals who on the employment end. A point of the recent editorial has been that a lot of locals are employed in places like Walmart, which is true, but employment, let's say, in the electronics department of Walmart is distinctly different than owning your own small and local electronics store. The backers of the bill have at least mentioned that if the big box retailers are already figuring the tax into the cost of what we buy here anyhow, it's foolish to pass up on imposing the tax.
On this general topic, as perhaps a coincidence, there are persistent rumors going around that one of the really large sporting goods stores may set up shop in Casper. Generally, I suspect, most sportsmen will be gladdened by that, but it concerns me. Casper was fortunate to have three locally owned sporting goods stores for decades, by which I mean outdoor sports (hunting and fishing) which survived through numerous economic ups and downs. Remarkable in that is that one of them was a store whose owner had purchased it from a regional chain when that chain pulled out of town.
All three of those stores are now gone, but two of them are occupied by outdoor sports stores today still, one of which purchased a small store when the prior owner retired and another which is located where one of those stores, which was also a hardware store, had been. That store isn't a hardware store at all, but a medium sized sporting goods store which is part of a Wyoming chain of some sort, although each store I've been in is distinctly different. A larger sporting goods store that's part of a Canadian chain is also here, although its franchiser had some sort of economic problems a couple of years ago. It survived it however.
Anyhow, I can't help but feel that a really big chain store moving in here would be bad for all three of those locals stores in varying degrees. And that worries me.
Something that also bothers me a bit is that at least by my observation the big store that's rumored to be moving in here has declined in quality since they went from being a larger catalog company with a single outlet store. It may be just me, but I can recall going to their small store in the small town where they were headquartered some thirty years ago and then feeling the big one that replaced it, when it was still a single outlet, was good, but not as good. Now that it has multiple outlets they just aren't as good, although I'll still stop in the ones in the neighboring states if I go by them and have bought things there that I couldn't find here. Recently that store was bought by another big chain store and I don't think the merger has helped at all.
From time to time, it might help to think where these things are going. There was an era, even fairly recently here, when opening a small local sporting goods store was an option. It's getting to be less of one.
Another bill that sailed through the House but which is now meeting opposition, indeed it can't even secure introduction, is one that would lift a cap in electrical net metering.
The way this works is this. If you put up a solar generator or a wind generator at your residence and generate enough electricity that you are contributing more than you consume, the power company has to pay you back, but only up to the capped amount, which is apparently 25 kilowatts. The bill proposes to lift that cap so no matter how much you generate they have to buy it from you.
It's hard to see what the downside of this is and it rather obviously applies to very few people. Folks with strong localist, distributist, or green inclinations, which aren't all the same by any means, would favor such independent home based electrical enterprise, but some in the Senate don't like it. A really prominent state senator was quoted to the effect that while it isn't a problem now, in places where there are a lot of these, it is.
I guess I can see that up to a point. If everyone put in efficient solar and electrical generators, or rather more likely if a lot of people did (which actually isn't very likely right now), it could become a burden on the power company and at some point its payments back out would create an economic viability problem. But it would seem that problem is a long ways off and encouraging this sort of thing would be a generally good idea or at least not a bad one. At least doubling the cap, which isn't being proposed, wouldn't seem unwarranted.
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