Top tax is 12 percent; Chicago’s 10.25 percent is highest big-city rate
While President Barack Obama's push to raise federal income taxes for the wealthy gets lots of attention, the continuing upward creep in the sales tax rates imposed by state and local governments has gotten less notice.
But Vertex Inc., which calculates sales tax for Internet sellers, reports that the average general sales tax rate nationwide reached 8.629 percent at the end of 2009, the highest since the company started tracking data in 1982.
That was up a nickel on a taxable $100 purchase from a year earlier and up nearly 40 cents for the decade. The highest sales tax rate in the country now stands at 12 percent.
