The “Marketplace Fairness Act,” which would give states the ability to extend their tax regimes to retailers beyond their borders and give Virginia a new source of transportation funding is now dead (for this year). And opponents can thank John Boehner for that:
Boehner’s opposition to the Main Street Fairness Act means the bill, which would allow states and local governments to collect sales taxes on Internet sales by businesses located outside their borders, will not pass during this session of Congress. Some supporters of the bill, which passed the Senate in May 2013, had pushed for Congress to pass the bill during a year-end congressional session beginning this week.
But Boehner has long opposed efforts to expand Internet sales taxes, said spokesman Kevin Smith.
“The speaker has made clear in the past he has significant concerns about the bill, and it won’t move forward this year,” Smith said by email Tuesday.
And so a selling point of the transportation tax bill that still roils the GOP goes down for the time being and the happiest folks in the world are…the lobbyists on both sides, who get to keep pushing on the string for at least another year. Or more.
And yes, Virginia, that does mean your pump prices will rise by about a nickel in January. The fallback position of transportation tax supporters was that if Congress did nothing on online sales, the wholesale gas tax would go up instead.
Regardless of the method, the worthies made the tax system more opaque and broke the user pays model (though slightly less so when the wholesale gas tax rises).
A far more honest way to doing it would have been a straight gas tax hike. Users would have paid at the pump. Prices would have risen — perhaps substantially, and that would have hurt a lot of folks.
It also would have been a stop-gap solution, as the per-gallon gas tax system is dying and even more, Virginia’s road system is still based largely on the Byrd model. Harry’s long gone, but his transportation legacy endures. As long as that is true, nothing the General Assembly does to prop-up road funding will cover costs for more than a few years.
So keep your talking points handy.
