The state of Iowa currently has taxes on both beer and wine but now tax on liquor. If the state was to put a small tax on liquor, the extra state revenue can be used to help fix Iowa. Below are some reasons the state should think about taxing liquor in order to raise more money:
- Iowa currently has a state debt of $6,120,464,000.
- That’s a debt per capita of $1,960 for every Iowa resident.
- American Society of Civil Engineers gave Iowa an Infrastructure Report Card Grade of C- in the year 2015.
- Average student loan debt for Iowans is $29,732.
- Average income for young college grad is $47,000.
Calculate the yearly liquor sales for each store using the provided data. Add up the transactions for each year, and store sales in 2015 specifically will be used later as your target variable. Use the data from 2015 to make a linear model using as many variables as you find useful to predict the yearly sales of all stores. You must use the sales from January to March as one of your variables. Use your model for 2015 to estimate total sales in 2016, extrapolating from the sales so far for January to March of 2016. Report your findings, including any projected increase or decrease in total sales (over the entire state) for the tax committee of the Iowa legislature. Use cross-validation to check how your model predicts to held out data compared to the model metrics on the full dataset. Fit your model(s) using one or both of the regularization tactics covered. Explain whether the regularized or the non-regularized model performed better and what the selected regression(s) are doing.