Taxes

Iowa squashes tax

By: Christine Vestal - November 2, 2007 12:00 am

Apparently spooked by news in The Des Moines Register of his state’s pumpkin tax, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver (D) squashed the 2006 ruling, calling it “ridiculous.” Before Culver took office, the revenue department reclassified the vegetable, reasoning that it doesn’t qualify for a sales tax exemption on food because it primarily is used for jack-o’-lanterns, the paper reports .

Talk about multi-tasking. Ohio police officer Lt. Jeff Braley testified at the Statehouse on a bill to require jail sentences for Internet sex crimes, and at the same time, he was conducting a sting operation. In e-mails to a local lawyer, Braley posed as a 14-year-old girl on a field trip to the Capitol. The lawyer showed up and was charged with attempted unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, The Columbus Dispatch reports.

Forget your liability insurance if you get sued for stealing another man’s wife in South Dakota. The state’s high court ruled that having an affair is an intentional act and should not be encouraged by allowing people the financial protection provided by insurance, according to The Associated Press in Pierre.

Texas horse dentists are fighting mad because the state just decided only veterinarians can fix equine teeth. Claiming they were better trained than most vets, the dentists sued the state Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners for taking away their livelihood. The board’s director argued dentists must be reined in because they’ve started using power tools to file their patients’ teeth and “horses won’t stand still for people putting power tools in their mouth without sedation,” The AP in Austin reports.

Partisan politics is one thing, but getting between Wisconsin sports fans and TV broadcasts of the Green Bay Packers and University of Wisconsin Badgers games is serious business. Democratic and Republican lawmakers are teaming up to resolve a dispute between cable companies and independent sports networks to make sure viewers can watch the games at a reasonable price, according to The (Madison) Capital Times .

The Lone Star state’s library and archives commission just put out a Texas-sized report – 668 pages – concluding the state spends far too much time and money writing reports. The commission found more than 1,600 reports that are “obsolete, duplicative or not needed as frequently as currently required,” according to the American-Statesman .

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