australians bet horses and read ny const art 1 sec 3 and rember the dearly departed of nyc otb
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Australia Scraps Tax on Tampons, Once Considered a ‘Luxury’
SYDNEY, Australia — When Australia’s conservative government first introduced a federal goods and services tax in 2000, the health minister at the time met with protests over a new 10 percent levy applied to tampons and other female sanitary products.
Anything that did not prevent diseases, the minister, Michael Wooldridge, argued, should be taxed.
“As a bloke, I’d like shaving cream exempt, but I’m not expecting it to be,” Mr. Wooldridge, a Liberal Party member, told a reporter that January. Condoms were exempt but tampons were not, because “condoms prevent illness,” he said. “I wasn’t aware that menstruation was an illness.”
Tampons and pads were, at the time, considered “luxury” goods and taxed as such.
It has taken years, and successive governments — both conservative and progressive — for a recognition that sanitary products were a necessary health item for women.
On Wednesday, the six men and two women who hold the purse strings for their states and territories announced that they had agreed to a government proposal to exempt such items from taxes.
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The exemption will go into effect on Jan. 1, Australia’s treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, said.
“I think this was a tax anomaly,” he told a Sydney radio station on Wednesday. The exemption will cost states about 30 million Australian dollars, or $21.5 million, annually but he argued that those revenues would be offset by other sources.
The exemption, 18 years in the making, elicited a wry laugh from Clementine Ford, a feminist commentator, who has paid the tax on tampons for much of her adult life, and even protested it as a university student.
“I feel like it’s been there for so long,” she said of the tax. “At different points there’s been a concerted push against it. It’s just about people having the power to change having no political will.”
The fight over a tampon tax goes beyond Australia’s shores. In the United States, there is no tax in nine states for products like menstrual cups, pads and tampons. Five other states have no sales tax at all. Washington’s mayor signed an exemption into law last year. But 36 American states still tax sanitary products, according to the group Period Equity.
Kenya was among the first countries to eliminate the tax on tampons and pads in 2004. India ended its 12 percent tax on sanitary products in July last year, and Canada abolished its goods and services tax completely in 2015.
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Julie Smith, a researcher at the Australian National University College of Health and Medicine, said that in the past tampons were considered a luxury item.
“Alongside things like nontaxation of condoms, cotton pads and razors, it does seem there are anomalies in the GST that are based on some pretty outdated attitudes, and a lack of understanding,” she said, referring to Australia’s goods and services tax.
The new exemption for sanitary products is seen by some as a politically expedient move to help the governing Liberal Party try to rebuild its reputation after a recent political putsch.
Ms. Ford, the commentator, said that though pleased by Wednesday’s announcement, she remains cynical about the government’s actions.
“It’s completely absurd that this tax even existed, so I’m wary of the act of overcelebrating because of how it might reflect on the government positively,” she said. “I don’t want to reward the Liberal government for finally deciding to get rid of a tax they instated that is completely unfair. It’s just as it should be.”
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Tampon Tax Finally Ends In Australia. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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