Good catch from Donald Gilliland in his piece on online sales tax collections:
The Corbett administration didn’t announce it would be aggressively collecting use tax until November. If the taxpayer failed to keep receipts for all purchases, the new tax booklet offers a handy table of estimated tax based on income.
A curious feature of that table is that the wealthiest pay a rate 25 percent lower than the poorest of Pennsylvanians. The sales tax is 6 percent. The estimates in the table assume a person making $30,000 a year would buy $200 in goods over the Internet; it therefore suggests $12 be paid in tax. For people who make over $200,000, however, the table offers a choice: use a percentage of income or $71, whichever is lower. If the rich-folks rate (0.03 percent of income) were applied to the person making only $30,000 a year, he’d pay $9 in use tax, instead of the suggested $12.
That’s pretty messed up. I would just add that there’s no reason the sales tax has to be regressive, or this unwieldy or difficult to collect. To make it progressive, you could just tax people on the difference between their income and their savings, and then just deduct the first $30,000 or so of consumption. I’d also tax all consumption above $100,000 at a higher rate, to raise more money from luxury purchases.
