A study by the Illinois Policy Institute, a market-oriented think tank, concludes that between 1991 and 2009, Illinois lost more than 1.2 million residents — more than one every 10 minutes — to other states. Between 1995 and 2007, the total net income leaving Illinois was $23.5 billion. The five states receiving most refugees from Illinois were Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona and Texas. Two are Illinois’ neighbors, three have warm weather, two — Florida and Texas — have no income tax. In January, a lame-duck session of Illinois’ legislature — including 18 Democrats who were defeated in November — raised the personal income tax 67 percent and the corporate tax almost 50 percent. This and the increase — from 3 percent to 5 percent — in the tax on small businesses make Illinois, as the Wall Street Journal says, “one of the most expensive places in the world to conduct business.”
Working up a tax storm in Illinois - The Washington Post
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2 comments:
Murray sez:
In Illinois it gets even worse. As businesses and people leave the ones remaining have to shoulder a larger piece of the local taxes. My home in Florida is worth 42%more that my home in Illinois but my property taxes in Illinois are 31% higher. Anyone interested in retiring in the Midwest?
The George F. Will column is misinformed.
One Howler:"..Main Street stores pay sales taxes to support local police, fire and rescue, sewage, schools and other services. If Amazon’s Seattle headquarters catches fire, will Champaign, Ill., firefighters extinguish it?"
Sales Tax is a consumption tax and is actually a tax on the consumers.
Making the retailer responsible for collecting it is the only practical way to enforce the law, rather than the honor system of expecting the consumer to declare and pay the tax.
One can argue about the merits of this system of raising revenues, and that is a separate debate. As long as this system of taxation stands, it should be fairly and uniformly applied without unfairly out-of-state online merchants as a favored class of merchants exempted from the task of collecting the consumption tax like their fellow in-state competitors. All consumers should get more bang for their buck and the rewards should go to the businesses which sell for less as a result of their superior business practices and not inequitable government regulations.
Measures like the Illinois legislation have been rendered impotent by hardball counter-measures of dropping affiliates that online retailers like Amazon have adopted. But that fact does not render the effort as somehow illegitimate as you seem to suggest. But state after state have been pursuing this type of whack-a-mole measure as a result of Congress’ inaction to plug this loophole which even the Supreme Court exhorted it to do in its 1992 Quill vs. N. Dakota decision which created this loophole.
I would like to pass on some excerpts from a recent column in RedState.com blog on this subject.
http://www.redstate.com/athensrunaway/2011/03/11/state-chamber-of-commerce-declares-war-on-amazoncoms-crony-capitalism/
Quote:
..Are some animals more equal than others?
Equality under the law is one of the cornerstones of capitalism.
What does that mean?
It means that, in order for free-market capitalism to thrive, the government can not be picking winners and losers..
And a column from Slate Magazine which illuminates this subject:
Every Day's a Tax Holiday: How Amazon.com undersells Best Buy, the Apple store, and almost everybody else.
http://www.slate.com/id/2275552/
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