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Local sales taxes are some of the easiest to get passed. Even in very conservative areas they tend to get passed and renewed. They are popular because the public gets to vote on them existing and because it's much easier to see how the taxes are being spent.

I live in a conservative area right now and can't remember a local sales tax ever being voted down. The only case I can think of was when I lived in the middle of a large city (very left leaning) and the local sales tax was voted down because the politicians pushing for it had not said exactly what it would be spent on other than "special projects". They had previously diverted a good chunk of property tax revenues to building a new sport stadium because the billionaire owner was threatening to move the team to another state. The public wasn't given an opportunity to vote on that gift of their taxes to a billionaire so there probably was both mistrust and a degree of blowback. Other than that case, local sales taxes, dedicated to a local purpose or project list, are popular here.

If the sales taxes all went to DC to be piled together and subject to the whims of whatever party was in charge at the time, they'd be far less popular. Asking locals to pay an extra 1% to renovate and expand the local schools is pretty easy. Asking the entire country to pay an extra 1% to "Make American Schools Great Again" is a much more difficult sell.




I strongly suspect that part of the reason sales taxes are easy to pass is because it's really hard to convert that into a dollar amount that you'll end up paying. For income tax, you can ballpark it by just multiplying your income by the percentage increase. If you want a better answer, you need to see how much of your income falls into the affected brackets, but you can still get an answer in 15 minutes or so.

It's really hard to figure out how many more dollars I'm going to pay in taxes if the sales tax goes up 1%. I have to figure out how much money I spend on goods that have sales tax. Okay, so I put $X in my savings account which isn't taxed, and I pay $Y in rent, which means I'm spending $Z on other stuff. Oh right, but not all of that has sales tax, so I have to take that stuff out. It gets complicated, fast, and the best you're going to get is an estimate. If any of those numbers change, my sales tax burden changes.

Plus sales tax is deferred until you spend the money, so there's no immediate obvious impact. It's not like you have less money than you did last year, although your spending power does go down every so slightly.

Income taxes are unpopular to adjust because it's easy to see how much you're losing, and it directly impacts your paychecks, which people don't like.




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