There’s been some confusion in recent days about whether the 258 members of Congress who have signed Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” are allowed to vote in favor a bill that lets states collect sales taxes owed on purchases made over the Internet.  There is no reason for any confusion on this point.  Anybody with 15 seconds of free time and the ability to read the one sentence promise contained in the national pledge can see it’s completely irrelevant to the debate over online sales taxes:

I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.

Since federal income tax rates, deductions, and credits are altered exactly zero times in the online sales tax legislation set to be voted on by the Senate, Grover’s federal affairs manager is being less than truthful when she says that “there’s really not any way an elected official [who signed the pledge] can vote for this.”

There’s no doubt that Grover would be tickled pink to have gotten 258 of our elected officials to pledge opposition to improving states’ ability to limit sales tax evasion over the Internet.  For that matter, he would probably be even more excited to have gotten those officials to promise to vote against any increase in the estate tax, gasoline tax, or cigarette tax, as well as the creation of a carbon tax or a VAT.  But none of these things fall within the scope of the pledge, either, and it’s a shame that Grover and his spokespeople have shown no interest in being truthful on this point.

By now you've probably heard that the U.S. Senate is close to approving a bill that would allow the states to collect the sales taxes already owed by shoppers who make purchases over the Internet.  Currently, sales tax enforcement as it relates to online shopping is a messy patchwork, with retailers only collecting the tax when they have a store, warehouse, headquarters, or other “physical presence” located in the same state as the shopper.  In all other cases, shoppers are required to pay the tax directly to the state, but few do so in practice.  The result of this arrangement is both unfair (since the same item is taxed differently depending on the type of merchant selling it) and inefficient (since shoppers are given an incentive to shop online rather than locally).

Unsurprisingly, two of the strongest proponents of a federal solution to this problem have been traditional “brick and mortar” retailers that compete with online merchants and state lawmakers struggling to balance their states’ budgets even as sales tax revenues are eroded by online shopping.  But this issue has also turned anti-tax advocates, states without sales taxes, and even online retailers against one another in surprising ways, for reasons of ideology and self interest. 

Ideological Frenemies, Norquist and Laffer

Supply-side economist Arthur Laffer recently argued in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that states should be allowed to enforce their sales taxes on online shopping as a basic matter of fairness, so that “all retailers would be treated equally under state law.”  We completely agree with this point, but Laffer makes clear that his larger aim is to shore up state sales taxes in order to make cuts to his least favorite tax—the personal income tax. It’s no secret that Laffer wants states to shift toward a tax system that leans heavily on regressive sales taxes, but it’s harder to advocate for such a shift if the tax can be easily avoided by shopping online.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform stands in direct opposition to Laffer on this issue.  Norquist has been “making the case on the House side of either seriously amending it or even stopping” federal efforts to allow for online sales tax enforcement.  But Norquist reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue when he argues that out-of-state retailers should be free from having to collect sales taxes because “you should only be taxing people who can vote for you or against you.”  In reality, retailers aren’t being taxed at all—they’re simply being required to do their part in making sure their customers are paying the sales taxes already owed on their purchases.

Delaware vs. The Other No-Sales-Tax States

Four states levy no broad-based sales tax at either the state or local level: Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon and Senators from these last three states are generally not interested to helping other states enforce their sales tax laws. After all, why vote for a “new tax” if there’s no direct benefit to their own states’ coffers?

But Delaware’s senators see the issue differently, as both Sen. Carper and Sen. Coons voted in favor of the bill.  In fact, Carper introduced his own bill for collecting tax on e-purchases years ago, explaining it this way: “The Internet is undermining Delaware's unique status” because “part of Delaware's attraction to tourists is that people can come and shop until they drop and never have to pay a dime of sales tax.”

Amazon vs. Other Internet Retailers

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that online retailers as a group have opposed legal requirements that their customers pay sales taxes on their purchases since it means these e-retailers would have to charge and collect that tax.  Some companies, however, like Netflix, have long collected (PDF) those sales taxes, even without a legal requirement to do so. But most have clung to online sales tax evasion as a way to undercut traditional retailers by up to 10 percent (or more, depending on the sales tax rate levied where the buyer is located).

One recent exception is eBay, which appears to have seen the writing on the wall and has pivoted from opposing the bill to watering it down – and it’s deploying its 40 million users as an army of online lobbyists to that end.

But it is Amazon that stands apart from other online retailers in fully supporting a federal solution to the patchwork of state laws and the growing number of deals it has finally had to strike with states. The company’s reason is likely two-fold.

First, Amazon has a “physical presence” in a growing number of states and plans to continue its expansion in order to make next-day-delivery a reality for more of its customers. As a result, Amazon will be legally required to remit sales taxes in more states in the future and will find itself at a competitive disadvantage if other online retailers remain free from sales tax collection requirements.  Second, Amazon processes a large number of sales for other merchants through its website and collects sales taxes on behalf of some of them – for a fee.  Amazon’s sales tax collection services could become much more lucrative in the future if more of the merchants it partners with are required to collect sales taxes.

Since January, we’ve brought you updates as best we could about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s controversial tax swap plan, but details remained elusive. Finally, late last week, the Governor released enough information – including a newly calculated, bigger sales tax rate increase – and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) was able to complete a full analysis of the Governor’s tax plan. The centerpiece of the Jindal plan is the outright repeal of the state’s personal and corporate income and franchise taxes. These tax cuts would be paid for primarily by increasing the state sales tax rate from 4 percent to 6.25 percent, and expanding the base of the tax to include a wide variety of previously untaxed services and goods.

ITEP’s analysis shows that, if fully implemented in 2013, the plan would increase taxes on the poorest sixty percent of Louisianans overall, while providing large tax cuts for the best-off Louisiana taxpayers. In fact, ITEP found that the poorest 20 percent of Louisianans would see a net tax increase averaging $283, or 2.4 percent of their income, while the very best-off Louisianans would see a tax cut averaging almost $30,000, or 2.5 percent of this group’s total income.

Louisiana Department of Revenue (DOR) Executive Counsel Tim Barfield continues to insist that all Louisianians will be better off under the Governor’s plan. But, as ITEP’s report points out, DOR’s estimates are flawed: they only include the impact of taxes paid directly by individuals and they ignore the impact of taxes paid initially by businesses. This approach presents an incomplete picture of how the Jindal plan would affect Louisianans, though, because a substantial share of the current sales tax, and the large majority of the expanded sales tax base the Governor proposes, would be paid initially by businesses. Economists generally agree that these business sales taxes are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Louisianans themselves aren’t buying the Governor’s numbers either. His tax swap plan has the support of only 27 percent of Louisianans – and that was before he upped the sales tax increase even further.

Read ITEP’s full analysis of Govenor Jindal’s tax plan here.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal today announced some details of his long-awaited “tax swap” plan. He proposes to repeal the state’s personal and corporate income taxes in a “revenue-neutral” way—that is, the revenue loss from repealing these taxes would have to be entirely offset by tax hikes in other areas.

We know the Governor’s so-called reform plan would increase the state sales tax rate from 4 to 5.88 percent—which in local-tax-heavy Louisiana means the average combined state and local sales tax rate statewide would shoot up from about 8.75 percent to a whopping 10.6 percent.

Since the sales tax rate hike would only pay for about a third of the revenue lost from repealing the income and corporate taxes, Jindal’s plan also relies heavily on expanding the state sales tax base to make up the remaining difference. Acccording to the Governor, he’d do it by eliminating close to 200 currently-existing sales tax exemptions. Jindal would also raise the cigarette tax by over $1 per pack.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the plan (which was the case with his earlier plan, too). Jindal has said he will provide tax relief to seniors and low-income families to offset the impact of these potentially huge sales tax hikes. But how that would be implemented—and, critically, how much it would cost—remains unknown.

Still, the specific details we’ve heard so far are enough to raise several important concerns about the plan’s plausibility—and its impact on tax fairness and sustainability if it is enacted.

Eliminating sales tax exemptions is perhaps the most politically difficult tax reform challenge for state lawmakers – as Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton is the most recent to discover. Sure, every state tax commission for decades has identified expanding the sales tax base, mainly to services that account for more consumer dollars every year, as a way of making the sales tax a more sustainable revenue source for the long haul. But the fact is that the potentially devastating impact of this move on low-income families, coupled with the entrenched opposition of lobbyists for the many industries that would be newly taxed under these proposals, have generally meant that these proposals die a quick death in legislatures.

And even if the Louisiana Legislature could achieve what virtually no other state has ever done—wiping the slate clean by broadly erasing sales tax exemptions from the books—it seems inevitable that the plan as a whole would result in a massive tax shift onto middle- and low-income families—and a giant tax cut for the best-off Louisianans. Unless, that is, Louisiana is prepared to enact a low-income tax credit, one so generous it would dwarf anything offered by other states. But it appears that Governor Jindal's plan would only provide a tax rebate only to families earning less than $20,000, which does nothing to offset the sales tax increases facing a large group of middle-income Louisianans.

In recent months, Jindal has also made it clear that his motivation for this tax plan is to be more “competitive” and more like Texas and other “low tax” states. (Never mind that Texas is a high tax state for its poorest residents.)  Jindal has bought into a talking point crafted by Arthur Laffer (and disseminated by groups like ALEC and the Tax Foundation) about job growth resulting from low taxes.  But Laffer’s argument is a house of cards, entirely unsupported by the evidence, as ITEP has shown.  Early news reports of Jindal’s plan are that anti-tax groups love it and it boosts his odds of getting the Republican presidential nomination. But unless a tax plan is well received by ordinary constituents and boosts the state’s odds of economic success, it isn’t worthy of the word “reform.”

UPDATE: On April 3, 2013 Governor McDonnell signed the package described below with only minor changes.  Those changes are discussed at the end of this article.

If Governor Bob McDonnell signs the transportation bill just passed by his state’s legislature, as he is expected to do, Virginia will join Wyoming as the second Republican-led state in less than a month to raise taxes to pay for transportation.  Virginia Delegate David Albo, one of Grover Norquist’s no tax pledge signers, explained his vote in favor of the bill by saying, “I looked at every single way to raise money for roads, and it is literally impossible to do without raising revenue.”

But as encouraging as it is to see opposition to taxes waning in some circles, the tax bill passed by Virginia’s legislature is far from perfect. The bill will shift the responsibility for paying for roads away from the drivers who use them most, and its reliance on sales taxes will shift Virginia’s already regressive (PDF) tax system even more heavily toward lower-income families.  Here’s a quick rundown of the bill’s major components:

Gasoline tax:  The 17.5 cent per gallon gasoline tax will be cut, at least in the short-term, by replacing it with a tax based on 3.5 percent of the wholesale price of gasoline.  At the current wholesale price of $3.30 per gallon, the new tax should be about 11.5 cents—the lowest in the country outside of Alaska—but it will rise over time as the price of gas climbs. Virginia will become the 15^th state to levy a gas tax that grows automatically over time, which allows the tax to better keep pace with the rising cost of construction.  But wholesale gas prices will have to rise to $5.00 per gallon before the tax returns the 17.5 cent level that Virginians have been paying for the last quarter century.  The bill amounts to a gas tax cut that lets frequent and long-distance drivers off the hook for paying for the transportation enhancements that benefit them the most.

Diesel tax:  Taxes on diesel fuel will increase both in the short- and long-term, as the 17.5 cent per gallon tax is replaced by a 6 percent tax based on the wholesale price of diesel.  Diesel prices are generally higher than gasoline prices, so at a wholesale price of $3.50, for example, the new tax should equal 21 cents per gallon and will grow over time as diesel prices rise. 

Remote sales tax:  The bill assumes that Congress will enact legislation empowering Virginia to require online retailers to collect the sales taxes owed by their customers (PDF), but it also puts in place a stopgap measure in case that doesn’t happen.  If Congress hasn’t acted by 2015, the wholesale gasoline tax rate will rise from 3.5 percent to 5.1 percent.  At current prices, this would bring the gas tax to16.8 cents per gallon.  Virginia should raise its wholesale gas tax rate to at least this level, regardless of the outcome of the federal debates over taxing online purchases.

Sales tax:  The largest single revenue-raiser in the bill is an increase in the state sales tax rate from 5 percent to 5.3 percent in most parts of the state. In the densely populated and congested areas of Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, residents will see their sales tax rates rise to 6 percent, and will be forced to dedicate the additional revenue to transportation.

General fund raid:  Following the unfortunate precedent set by Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin and the federal government, the bill also prioritizes roads over other areas of government by shifting $200 million away from the general fund every year.  The Roanoke Times previously blasted a similar proposal from Governor McDonnell by pointing out: “The highway program is starved for money because the gas tax rate has not changed since 1987. Are teachers and their students to blame? No, they are not. Did doctors and mental health workers cause the problem? Absolutely not. Did sheriff's deputies and police officers? No.”

Motor vehicle sales tax:  The sales tax break on motor vehicle purchases will be reduced, but not eliminated.  The rate will rise from 3 percent to 4.3 percent – still short of the 5.3 percent general sales tax rate.

Hybrid tax:  Hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles will have to pay an additional $100 in registration taxes every year.  So, while drivers of gas-guzzling vehicles are receiving a break in the form of a lower gas tax, fuel-efficient hybrid owners will actually pay more.

Low-income offsets: The state and local sales taxes used to raise the bulk of new road funding under this plan will hit lower- and moderate income families hardest.  And yet, the bill lacks any kind of targeted tax relief for those families.  In-state analysts urged the creation of a sales tax rebate or the enhancement of the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), but the final bill did not include either of these measures.

UPDATE: The version of this package that was signed into law is slightly different than the one originally passed by the legislature: the motor vehicle sales tax is raised to 4.15 percent instead of 4.3 percent, the hybrid tax is $64 per year instead of $100, miscellaneous local tax increases in northern Virginia were scaled back, and technical changes were made to local taxes in order to avoid a constitutional challenge.

After a year in which tax issues dominated national policy debates, President Barack Obama has signaled that immigration issues will be at the forefront of his legislative agenda in 2013. With immigration reform evidently gaining momentum, some old tax-related bugaboos are sure to resurface as the debate gets underway: in particular, some have argued that undocumented immigrants pay no taxes to states or to the federal government.

A couple of years ago, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) worked with the Immigration Policy Center to assess the truth of this claim. Our finding? Far from being tax avoiders, undocumented families pay many of the same regressive taxes that hit all low-income families at the state and local level. We estimated that nationwide, undocumented families paid about $11 billion in state and local taxes in 2010.

The main reason for this is that the sales and excise taxes that fall most heavily on low-income taxpayers don't depend on your citizenship status. Anytime you buy a cup of coffee, a pair of jeans or fill up your tank up with gas, you're paying state and local sales and excise taxes. There are also property taxes, including for renters, who pay them indirectly because landlords frequently pass some of their property tax bills on to their tenants in the form of higher rents. And, many undocumented taxpayers have state income taxes withheld from their paychecks each year.

The bottom line? Even if there were 47 percent of the population paying no taxes (and there isn’t), undocumented immigrants would not be among them. In fact, to find people who don’t pay taxes, take a closer look at the wealthiest among us.

Kansas First Lady Mary Brownback has been appointed an unofficial advisor to a task force addressing childhood poverty in the state. The Hays Daily News predicts that this could lead to some uncomfortable conversations between Governor Sam Brownback and his wife, especially regarding the tax package he recently signed into law that raised taxes on low-income families. The editors suggest, “[m]aybe the first lady can ask why the governor and state legislature agreed to an unprecedented reduction in income tax rates while at the same time eliminating various tax credits, such as the food sales tax rebate and breaks for child care and renters.”

Monday was the biggest day ever for online shopping. “Cyber Monday” shoppers spent 30 percent more this year than last. The Illinois Retail Merchants Association and other brick-and-mortar business groups used Monday’s online shopping surge to remind shoppers and policymakers alike that sales taxes should be collected on Internet purchases just as on items purchased in traditional stores: “The tax is supposed to be paid. If someone orders something from an online retailer or a catalog retailer that doesn’t collect the tax, the customer owes the money to the state.”

It appears that the gap between Wisconsin’s rich and poor continues to widen. The bottom two fifths of the state’s residents actually saw their incomes decline while the top fifth – and especially the top one percent – saw theirs climb over the last 25 years. One solution to this problem, identified by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and the Wisconsin Budget Project, is to reform the state’s regressive tax structure because currently, “state and local taxes in Wisconsin increase income inequality rather than reduce it.”

A recent policy brief from the Washington State Budget and Policy Center identifies eight strategies to rebuilding the state’s economy. One of the goals identified is implementing a “Productive, Equitable Revenue System” through modernizing the tax structure and making it more fair. Washington has the most regressive state tax structure in the country; low income people pay far more of their income in taxes compared to wealthy Washingtonians. If state policymakers want to rebuild their economy, improving their tax structure is a good place to start.

When Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law a $4.5 billion (over six years) tax cut package ealier this year, he told Kansans, “I think we are going to be in good shape.” He promised tens of thousands of new jobs and insisted “[w]e will meet the needs of our schools ... Our roads will be built.”  But after claiming as recently as July that the state was in “an excellent fiscal position,” the Governor is conceding that even across-the-board spending cuts may not be enough to make up for the massive revenue losses (projected to be $2.5 billion over six years) from these tax cuts – that will go disproportionately to the state’s most affluent.  

The Governor received national praise from conservative quarters for the tax package he signed into law in May. The plan included income tax rate reductions, elimination of several low-income credits, completely eliminating taxes on some business income, and was supposed to put the state “on a road to faster growth.” But the reality is that tax cuts cost money and Governor Brownback is now indicating he is open to a sales tax hike to pay for them.

The current 6.3 percent sales tax (a temporary revenue fix from 2010) is scheduled to drop back to 5.7 percent in July.  The Governor’s own original tax package, proposed in January, would have permanently held that sales tax rate steady, and thus cost much less than the tax legislation he eventually signed.  His plan was also seriously flawed: the bottom 80 percent of Kansas taxpayers would have seen a tax hike under the Governor’s plan because it reduced reliance on the state’s income tax in exchange for a higher sales tax. But once again, Governor Brownback finds himself relying on a higher sales tax (even though he ran against it in his 2010 campaign) because of income tax cuts that gut his state’s budget.  He rationalizes the need for a sales tax increase by saying, “There's going to be a two-year dip. That's the nature of these, when you cut taxes. If you cut them right, you get growth on the other side, but there's a dip first."

Unlike a progressive income tax, sales taxes (PDF) require low and middle income taxpayers to pay more of their income in taxes than wealthier taxpayers. This way of handling what Brownback euphemistically calls a “dip” that results from radical tax cuts actually falls hardest on the Kansas families who can least afford it.