I found one thing in Chris Cox’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in opposition to the Supreme Court’s reversing its decisions from 1967 to 1992 and allowing states to collect sales taxes from Internet sales from companies that do not have physical “nexuses” in their states interesting:
‘Our states are losing massive sales-tax revenues that we need for education, health care, and infrastructure,†South Dakota’s Attorney General Marty Jackley told the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday. His state’s Supreme Court opined that sales tax revenues have “declined.†The state Legislature, citing its own “finding†to this effect, enacted a law requiring out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax on purchases shipped to South Dakota.
But in addition to running counter to decades of precedent governing interstate commerce—which Mr. Jackley was in court asking the justices to overturn—the law is based on a false premise.
The state’s own data show that sales and use tax revenue grew from $787.7 million in 2013 to $974.7 in 2017—considerably faster than the state’s rate of economic growth. The governor’s budget for 2018 projects the state’s sales and use tax revenue will be more than $1 billion, 4% higher than last year, with no change in rate. That’s 29% higher than five years earlier. Sales-tax revenues have been booming in other states, too.
Intrigued, I decided to look at the experience in Illinois. Here’s the most recent data:
| Year | Revenue (in billions) |
| 2010 | $11.14 |
| 2011 | 10.60 |
| 2012 | 12.27 |
| 2013 | 12.54 |
| 2014 | 13.03 |
| 2015 | 13.40 |
| 2016 | 14.05 |
| 2017 | 14.59 |
All figures are taken from the web site of the Illinois Department of Revenue which was built using DreamWeaver which surprised me since Central Management Services, which sets the governance rules, essentially mandates Microsoft. It does, however, support a point I’ve made in the past.
Those are increases that outstrip the rate of inflation, increases in the state’s GDP, and increases in personal income by far. Illinois doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem.
