Tax-free week starts Sunday in Maryland

Maryland will begin a tax-free week on Sunday, August 14, allowing people to buy certain products at certain prices without paying any sales tax on those items, WBAL reports.

(Comptroller’s Office – Fact Sheet)

Illinois doesn’t have such a tax-free week, as far as I know, although Illinois collects a portion of sales tax at the local level. In Maryland, the sales tax of 6 percent all goes to the state. Illinois has about the same sales tax at the state level, but most cities and towns have an additional tax.

Unlike Illinois, at least 18 states have a tax-free week or weekend during the summer, designed specifically to allow parents to purchase back-to-school items for their kids.

Back-to-school outfits

One of the biggest items on back-to-school shopping lists is clothing and, especially for girls, an outfit for the first day of school. Despite the low probability anybody will remember what you wore on the first day of school, research suggests there may be a psychological advantage to “dressing for success.”

An article in The Atlantic says it’s not about how you look but about how your look makes you feel about yourself. Aside from not having to come up with something to wear on the morning of the first day, when you’re under enough pressure from ancillary matters, the advantage of having a cool outfit ready for the first day comes down to comfort with what you’re doing (and who you are) and confidence.

• First, a study last year out of Columbia University and California State University, Northridge, suggested that wearing more formal clothing leads to better outcomes on certain cognitive tasks. The research was published in the journal Social Psychology & Personality Science.
• Then, a 2012 study from Northwestern University coined the term “enclothed cognition” to illustrate the psychological effect clothing has on the person wearing it.

Researchers, including Adam Galinsky, who has shown in other work the connection between our feelings of authenticity and our moral sense, made it clear through experimentation that we’re more comfortable and confident if we’re showing our true colors. Our clothes reflect that.

For example, when doctors wear a white lab coat, they pay attention more to their work and perform certain tasks better than when they’re not wearing a white lab coat. (A white lab coat had no effect on the quality of tasks, say, that painters perform.)

But whether these studies show a connection between clothing at school and the academic success of students, plenty of school uniform-believers think it’s important to come to school in the right attire for learning. Our cognitive abilities are at least a little affected by the clothes we wear in a given situation, and with tax-free week upon us, that situation is “back to school.”

“Uniforms show that you are part of an organization,” The Guardian quoted Jason Wing, head teacher at the Neale-Wade academy in Cambridgeshire, England, as saying. “Wearing it says we’re all in this together. Also, if you wear your uniform with pride, it means you are half-way there to being respectful, buying into what the organization is all about.”

A new school year brings new challenges. A new outfit could fit right in.