In PA, a number of items are exempt from the tax including food from the grocery store, clothing and medicines. You can’t register a car in PA without showing proof of tax paid. Other big ticket items, like art, may be subject to various reporting agreements between the art houses and Revenue. So that leaves very little worth the drive – furniture, maybe? But I can’t fathom driving an hour to pick up my own furniture (on I-95, no less!) in exchange for the meager savings. Assuming you buy $1000 sofa (and make the decision not to pay use tax), you’ve “saved” $70, not including your time and cost of gas, by not paying sales tax.

People look to Delaware, much like they do to New Jersey, for other reasons… the most glaring being choices when it comes to alcoholic beverages. Our archaic alcoholic beverage laws may drive me to DE or NJ but not our tax laws.

Most of our on-line purchases are from Amazon, so the fact that they collect taxes on our purchases saves us time and trouble at tax time. Since all our out-of-state purchases are made with credit cards, we look over our end of year credit card summaries to identify the on-line purchases. Knowing that Amazon charges NYS sales tax means we can skip over those transactions and just identify the few occasional transactions from other out-of-state on-line sellers to check on their tax status.

The on-line merchants that refuse to charge NYS sales tax are the ones that require us to waste our time adding up the amounts we spent on taxable purchases. New Egg was a special pain last year, since they collected sales taxes on purchases made in some months but not in other months. Under existing tax law, that is their prerogative if they have managed to organize themselves in such a way that they do not have a NYS “nexus,” but it’s also our prerogative to do most of our business with other merchants who simplify our burden of complying with the NYS sales/use tax law.

We recently ordered a sofa from a store in an adjoining state. The salesperson apologized to us for the fact that she would have to charge us sales tax because we were having it delivered to us. She seemed surprised when we reassured her that we would have to pay the tax in any case, and that her store was actually making life easier for us and simplifying our tax compliance burden by collecting it as part of the transaction.

The politicians are insane by the colloquial definition – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I.E. raising taxes and expecting some kind of prosperity to ensue.