It’s Time to Establish Online Sale Taxes For Cities

As we head into 2019, a major concern of municipalities around our great country including Quincy is the loss of retail establishments. For a city who received sales tax monies from purchases made in Quincy, the loss of some major businesses has the City looking to other areas for tax money including the raising of property taxes. Let face it, the last couple of years have not been good to the retail industry here with the loss of Best Buy, Penneys, Bergners, Sears, K-Mart and now the Quincy Mall Theatre.  Those are the major retailers we have or will be losing and we are not even mentioning the smaller businesses. On-line purchases have eroded the retail base, not only here but everywhere.

For years people, including me, preached that shopping local is needed to keep our city strong and employment up. That battle is being lost. The Amazons and e-Bays of the world are reeling in massive amounts of profits with little being returned to local communities. Some state taxes are being collected, but they are not filtering down to the local level and that needs to change.

The time is now to contact your local state representatives on both sides of the river and ask them to propose a tax structure for online purchasing to benefit local communities. If you purchase something online, then the community you live in should benefit from the taxes incurred on that purchase.

This should help local municipalities. Unfortunately, it won't bring jobs back to those areas though.