State Rep. Christopher England (D-Tuscaloosa) said Wednesday he pre-filed legislation for the 2024 state legislative session to raise Alabama’s online sales tax rate from 8% to 9.25%.
While England believes the extra revenue could be used to help education in the state, others say this is not the right time to raise any taxes on Alabamians.
Thursday on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show,” State Sen. Sam Givhan (R-Huntsville) discussed England’s proposal.
“I doubt anybody’s going to have any appetite to raise taxes,” Givhan said. “I think counties are going to be fighting it and some other groups are going to be fighting it … I think there’s going to be a lot of different knife fights going on out there. We’ll have to see how all this rolls out.”
Givhan admitted, though, that there are issues with how the current tax system benefits online retailers.
RELATED: Rep. England files bill to increase online sales tax from 8% to 9.5%
“The retailers are paying property tax. Amazon is not paying property tax,” he said. “The retailers are basically, in many cases, show places for Amazon. People go in and say ‘yeah this is what I want’ and then they buy it on Amazon. That is bad for our local economy. Bad for society as far as I’m concerned.”
Givhan thinks they will have to overcome some hurdles to get any kind of new online sales tax through the Legislature.
“I don’t know if this is something the big 10 cities are behind or not,” he said. “I don’t know if things have been worked out with some of the warring factions if you will. But just to look at this, all cities don’t have the same sales tax, and I don’t know if [England] is trying to equalize that more or what he’s trying to do.”
The online sales tax is put mostly toward Alabama’s general fund budget, but England’s proposal would put the increase toward the education trust fund.
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
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