the trade deficit will just get worse.
what next sales tax on 3d printed objects?
3-d printed objects are going to be a game-changer.
In Virginia, they just added a new tax to owners of hybrid cars, because theoretically those people get better gas mileage and therefore are not paying “their fair share”. I think it would have been “fairer” if they had set a fuel standard instead, taxing everybody who bought a car which listed better than 40mpg highway for example. Still sucks in either case though.
But my point is — if a state decides that 3-d printing is costing them too much in sales tax, I would guess they will probably come up with a large tax on the raw material used in 3-d printers.
But I don’t know how that would work, or how else they could do taxes “fairly”; if you print something that would be cheap to buy, you shouldn’t pay as much in “tax” as you would if you print something that would have been “expensive” to buy.
I don’t think that 3d printing at this point is a real threat to the state sales tax. But I have a feeling that over time, sales tax is going to become a less-used form of taxation, because of the ways around it.