It’s “Black Monday,” that magical time of year when folks return to work after Thanksgiving. But instead of making sure that put cover sheets on their TPS reports, they are using the office’s high-speed connection to do their Christmas shopping online. For consumers, it’s a boon — no hunting for parking spaces, no check-out lines, no fist-fights over discounted Wiis. And for online retailers like Amazon, it’s a non-stop treasure bath.
But for local politicians, “Black Monday” is something to be despised. They dislike the idea that in a cubicle somewhere, someone is buying merchandise without paying any sales tax…and thus providing the politicians with the revenue to pay for roads, schools, health care, police and fire protection. And, for Virginia residents, whatever is left is used for incidentals like giving millions given to Rolls Royce, Micron, Microsoft, and Northrop Grumman.
Some in the General Assembly so dislike the idea of taxpayers skipping the sales tax via online shopping (even though you are supposed to report those figures voluntarily, so keep your receipts) that during the last session, Sen. Emmett Hanger, who long ago supported then-Gov. Mark Warner’s sales tax hike and has long-advocated taxing online sales, proposed a measure to do just that. Hanger’s bill, which earned strong bi-partisan support in the Senate, was aimed largely at Amazon and its affiliate network. Local retailers supported the idea out of “fairness.” The measure was eventually removed during budget negotiations with the House, but Hanger has promised to revive the concept in next year’s session.
So as you click around your favorite online store looking for the perfect gift for your special someone, or even a relative, remember that you are making a tax-happy legislator unhappy. And if he has his way, that tchotcke you simply must have and can only find online, will cost you even more next year.
Oh, and Sen. Hanger is also a great fan of hiking the gas tax and indexing it to rising fuel economy standards. So he’s for hitting you up whether you’re on the information superhighway, or the old-fashioned asphalt version. It’s almost as if he yearns for another sort of career…as a highwayman.
