Wat is sales tax?

A sales tax is a state or locality imposed percentage tax on the selling or renting of certain property or services. The fraction of the total taxes collected as sales taxes typically varies from about 25% to 50% of government revenue. Nearly all sales taxes have a large list of goods and services, varying from state to state, that the tax is not collected on. Because the tax is collected from the customer, it is a consumption tax. In the United States, it is nearly always explicitly added on and not included in the price, a notable exception is sales taxes on gasoline. If a person purchases property from an out-of-state seller, sales tax is not due, but rather the customer may owe a so-called use tax. For example, if a person purchases a computer from a local brick-and-mortar retail store, the store will charge the state's sales tax. However, if that person purchases a computer over the internet or from an out-of-state mail-order seller, sales tax may not apply to the sale, but the person could possibly owe a use tax on the purchase. Because of exclusions on what is taxed and not taxed the typical consumer will pay on average about 1/3 of the listed sales tax on all his/her expenditures, i.e. a 7.5% tax will collect on average about 2.5% of a persons income.[citation needed] The sales tax revenues are typically split into several fractions going to the state, schools, counties, cities, public transit and possibly other jurisdictions. The size and split of these fractions vary significantly from state to state except in the states that do not have a sales tax. Additional taxes like Hotel tax, Rental car use fee, etc. that are really disguised sales taxes are imposed typically on non voting visitors to a given location.

Ideally, a sales tax (under whatever name it's called) is fair, has a high compliance rate, is difficult to avoid, is charged exactly once on any one item, is simple to calculate and simple to collect. A conventional or retail sales tax attempts to achieve this by charging the tax only on the final retail transactions, not on intermediate businesses buying raw materials for production or finished goods for resale. This prevents so-called tax "cascading" or "pyramiding," in which an item is taxed more than once as it makes its way from production to final retail sale. Sales tax collection is well established in nearly all retail establishments and typically has a high tax compliance record in the United States. Many consider the sales tax as being nearly ideal since it taxes consumption but allows savings to grow untaxed.

Sales taxes are considered by some as regressive, that is, low income people tend to pay a greater percentage of their income in sales tax than higher income people, because they tend to spend a higher percentage of their income on taxed items. Others consider them one of the best taxes since they only tax consumption. In many locations items such as food, or prescription drugs are exempt from sales taxes to alleviate the burden on the poor. The loss of income is made up in other tax sources.

A related type of tax is the value-added tax or VAT. It is a system in which all businesses remit taxes on their sales but they are also refunded the amount of VAT remitted by their suppliers. In addition to avoiding cascading, under VAT there is no need for government to determine which sales are taxable and which are not, since all sales--retail, wholesale and intermediate--are taxed. Some or all of these taxes may be refunded but it generates a lot of paperwork (and income). The VAT paperwork can be burdensome but it remains a major source of tax income for most European Union, Mexico and other countries which charge on average a 15-25% VAT rate. Canadian sales taxes range from 0% in Alberta to an effective 10.6% in Prince Edward Island where sales tax is also applied to the federal Goods and Services Tax.

Most countries in the world have sales taxes or value-added taxes at all or several of the national, state, county or city government levels. Countries in western Europe, especially in Scandinavia have some of the world's highest valued-added taxes. Norway, Denmark and Sweden have the highest VATs at 25% although reduced rates are sometimes used.[citation needed] In some countries, there are multiple levels of government which each impose a sales tax. For example, sales tax in Chicago is 9%, consisting of 5% state, 2.25% city, 0.75% county and 1% regional transportation authority and that in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is 9%, consisting of 4% state and 5% local rate.1 However, there is no nationwide sales tax in the United States. Since the 1990s, the idea of replacing the income tax with a national sales tax has been floated in the United States; many of the actual proposals would include giving each household an annual rebate, paid in monthly installments, equivalent to the percentage of the tax (which varies from 15% to 23% in most cases) multiplied by the poverty level based on the number of persons in the household, in an effort to reduce the sales tax's inherent regressivity. While many political observers consider the chances remote for such a change, the FairTax Act has attracted more cosponsors than any other fundamental tax reform bill introduced in the House of Representatives.