By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island’s business community will descend upon the Statehouse Wednesday to make sure its voice is heard loudly and clearly.

Its message, according to David Carlin, vice president for government affairs, is a simple one: “The business community has had enough in terms of taxes, fees and new, creative ways to tax businesses. Do not raise taxes and fees and do not initiate new taxes and fees.
“We do not want to go back to the taxation dark years,” said Carlin, who is also spokesman for the Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce Coalition, a group of local chambers from up and down the state.
The immediate target of the businessmen’s ire is a bill being heard by the House Finance Committee Wednesday immediately following the House of Representatives session that would change the state’s tax landscape.
It would increase the income tax from the current 25 percent of a person’s federal income tax liability to 27.5 percent. It would also roll back the phase-out of the capital gains tax, hiking it from the current 1.67 percent to 5 percent.
The so-called Alternative Flat Tax for that gives high-income Rhode Islanders an option to lower their state tax burden would be eliminated
Sponsored by Rep. Arthur Handy in the House and Sen. Paul Moura in the Senate, the bill would greatly broaden the amount of business activity subject to the sales tax while gradually reducing the rate from the current 7 percent to 5.5 percent in 2012. The rate would go down one-half a percentage point each January 1, starting in 2010.
Items and services not currently covered by the sales tax that would be under the Handy-Moura include: dry cleaning and laundry services, articles of  clothing priced above $250, watch and jewelry repair, appliance repairs, greens fees at public golf courses and membership fees at private country clubs, health club fees, marina fees, tax preparation fees, payroll fees, telemarketing fees and telephone answering services, janitorial and landscaping fees, movie tickets, newspapers and advertising in newspapers and on radio and television, and numerous other goods and services.
The measure would also slap a 2 percent gross receipts tax on legal and accounting services.
If nothing else, Carlin told The Times, the business groups are concerned that the Handy-Moura bill, if not passed as written, might be used as a framework for developing the state budget for 2009.
“We can not be silent when a bill like Handy’s is out there,” Carlin said. “We can not rely on myself or (Northern RI Chamber of Commerce President) John Gregory” to lobby against it. “We need to show that it is members of the chamber who are affected by this. We have to make sure that the financial burden is not placed on the business community to balance the budget. Businesses do vote and we have to show them that owners and employees will be affected.”
The state is experiencing its deepest budget troubles since the credit union crisis of the early 1990, he said, “and it might even be worse now than it was then.”
Asked what the businessmen would have the legislature do to solve the problem rather than increasing taxes or fees, Carlin said, “That’s not what our job is. We don’t have the resources that the state does to figure out what to do. They have a very difficult job in front of them. Nobody envies any of them their jobs.
“They have a responsibility to look at rolling back the cost of state government,” Carlin said.
The chamber is mobilizing its members not only to show up for Wednesday’s hearing, but to contact their senators and representatives in advance by telephone and e-mail to make their opposition to the legislation known.