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Tilting at a Twinkie Tax in Maine

The snack tax is losing its crunch. The last holdout to single out snack foods for a sales tax--Maine--is poised to repeal the levy.

The snack tax is losing its crunch. The last holdout to single out snack foods for a sales tax--Maine--is poised to repeal the levy.

Maine was one of a handful of states that turned to a snack tax during tight budget times in the early 1990s. The current 5.5 percent tax (it used to be 6 percent) was supposed to be temporary, and with Maine running a budget surplus, the need for the $15 million a year that the tax brings has gone stale.

The idea of taxing chips, cookies and ice cream has never been very popular with either the people who make snack foods or those who eat them. California's snack tax was trounced in a ballot initiative eight years ago. Maryland repealed its version in 1997 as part of a deal to encourage Frito-Lay to add as many as 500 new jobs at a Maryland plant.

In Maine, taxing snacks was distasteful not just to citizens. Revenue officials were placed in the uncomfortable position of having to decide what is and is not a snack. Snacks in Maine were, in part, defined as not being part "of a well-balanced meal." But that means different things to different people. "Saltine crackers are taxable," says state Representative Joseph Perry, who deals with these matters first-hand at a grocery store he owns in Bangor. "I wouldn't snack on Saltines. To me, they're just something I put in my tomato soup."

A voter initiative that would repeal the snack tax is on the ballot for November. That seems likely to pass, unless the state legislature, which has been considering repealing the tax itself, gets to it first.

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