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Rick Perry Raised Taxes Last Month

We’ve now entered the period of Rick Perry’s juggernaut of a candidacy in which his actual record begins to be closely scrutinized and weighed against his simplified talking points (Government bad! Jobs good!). And it turns out that Perry, throughout his long tenure in public office, has supported literally billions of dollars in tax increases, the Texas Tribune finds. “[D]uring his six years in the Legislature,” the Tribune reports, “he voted more than a dozen times to allow higher taxes or to raise them.”

In 2006, Perry, as governor, “raised cigarette taxes by $1 a pack and vastly increased the number of businesses subject to the state franchise tax” in exchange for a property-tax cut. But the trade-off didn’t pay off for small-business owners:

That Perry supported some tax increases throughout his career should hardly be surprising. The GOP has never been crazy about taxes, but the idea that it’s an unforgivable sin to support any tax increases, of any kind, for any reason, ever, is a relatively recent addition to the Republican dogma. It’s not like he signed any new tax increases into law just a few weeks ago.

Oh.

Despite His Current Vehemence on Taxes, Perry Has a More Nuanced Record [NYT]

Rick Perry Raised Taxes Last Month