Gov. Tom Wolf's budget plan seeks to expand the number of goods and services that would be subject to a sales tax, including newspapers.

The Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association is our industry's mouthpiece to the state Legislature, seeking to advance the business interests of the state's news media companies and protecting the "free and independent press." It didn't take them long to go on record opposing the governor's sales tax.The PNA pointed out how tax exemptions for newspapers date back to this nation's very foundation and its War for Independence against the British crown. Before trying to tax the American colonies, the British government, in order to suppress the comments and criticisms the crown found objectionable, imposed a tax on newspapers and all advertisements in 1712.When the stamp tax went into effect, a number of newspapers ran editions with imagery of tombstones and skeletons, emphasizing that their papers were "dead" and would no longer be able to print. Historians blame the tax for the decline of English literature critical of the government during the period.The fires of the American Revolution were stoked in 1765 when the British government targeted newspapers in the American colonies. Twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies attended the The Stamp Act Congress in New York in 1765 to draft a set of formal petitions stating why Parliament had no right to tax them.The 20th century saw another precedent-setting legal action which the PNA noted in its opposition statement. In 1934, the Louisiana Legislature imposed a license tax of 2 percent on the gross advertising revenues of all newspapers, magazines and other publications with a weekly circulation of more than 20,000 copies. This was an attempt by the Huey Long administration to silence those newspapers that were critical of him.The publishers of 13 major papers affected by the tax joined in a lawsuit. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the publishers, calling the tax "a deliberate and calculated device ... to limit the circulation of (public) information."The high court held that corporations were "persons" for purposes of analysis under the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment, and found the tax to be an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.In his opinion to the court which was decided on Feb. 10, 1936, Justice George Sutherland wrote: "A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves."When the British crown imposed a tax on its own press two centuries ago, John and Leigh Hunt, the publishers of the Weekly Examiner, paid the stamp duty, but on the front page always called it the "tax on knowledge."Surely, no government leader today would want that kind of stigma attached to his or her legacy.By JIM ZBICKtneditor@tnonline.com