With so much discussion of late about taxes, mostly income taxes, we thought we’d look at another tax. This one rests particularly heavily on those at the lowest end of the income scale. It is the sales tax.

Sales taxes vary greatly from state to state and within a state from area to area. An example of this is Warren County, New York, located at the southern end of the Adirondack Mountains and encompassing the beautiful resorts surrounding Lake George. As a region for which tourism is a major economic engine, it levies its own local sales tax. Total sales taxes of 7% are collected in Warren County, 4% is a state level tax which is passed on to the state and the remaining 3% is retained by the county. Please note that this local sales tax may not be included when the U.S. Census Bureau does studies of national sales tax collections for a particular year by looking at the totals collected by each state. It depends on whether or not the state in question includes that local sales tax revenue in its summary of tax collections reported to the Census Bureau.

Today’s market size is the total collected for sales taxes in the United States by states in 2011. These sales taxes accounted in 2011 for 48.4% of the total of all taxes collected by state governments.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2011 (fiscal year)
Market size: $366.54 billion
Source: “State Government Tax Collections Summary Report: 2011,” April 12, 2012, a report from the Census Bureau available online here.
Original source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census
Posted on January 3, 2013 (still seems odd, 2013!)