Codi Galloway: Good morning, I’m here today to talk to you about tax relief, which is always an exciting topic. We have great news in Idaho, our economy is growing, sales tax revenues are growing, we have this fund of internet sales tax and we have a surplus of money.

The fiscally responsible thing to do when we’ve collected too much is to give it back, so we have a bill that’s coming to the house right now that does give it back to the people that paid it (House Bill 332). The first part of the bill, it just provides a refund and it’s a 6% income tax refund. We do take special care of those people that in the lowest income brackets and so instead of given them 6%, we bumped them up to a floor of $50 to make sure that they’re getting a good refund check as well. That’s part one, is we got to give them money back that we’ve over-collected.

Part two, is what we need to do is go ahead and make sure we don’t have this as an ongoing problem. We’re going to prove to provide $170 million of relief going forward by lowering the bracket in the future. Those are great solutions for our taxpayers in Idaho.

Now, just to make sure that no one think were underfunding roads or education, we have a lot of COVID money that’s coming in to the tune of almost a 25% increase in the education budget. We have not spent all of CARES one, SR1, so we have a lot of money there that we can’t even spend fast enough. I don’t want you to think this going to hurt education in any way, but it is going to help Idaho tax payers be able to have a bit of a refund for their overpayment and our strong economy. I look forward to that.