(The Center Square) – Legislators are considering another avenue to reduce the financial burden on Pennsylvania families.
Rep. Joe Hogan, R-Penndel, recently announced a package of bills that would exempt certain items from sales tax.
The items would include school supplies, cribs and crib mattresses; strollers, car seats and boosters; baby bottles and nipples, teethers; children’s books, toys, and sports equipment; and pet food.
“Providing financial relief from the sales tax will make it more affordable to raise a child and help working families across Pennsylvania,” said Hogan. “My legislation is focused on helping young families by exempting many of the critical items parents need when they welcome their children home.”
Hogan is joined by Representatives Kristin Marcell, R-Richboro; Thomas Kutz, R-Mechanicsburg; and K.C. Tomlinson, R-Bensalem.
“As inflation continues to hit every Pennsylvanian, we are seeing multiple key items for school-age children skyrocket in price,” said Marcell. “Exempting school supplies like folders, pencil cases, graphing calculators and more from the sales tax will have immediate benefits to the pocketbooks of parents across the state.”
The legislators hope that a more parent-friendly shopping climate will help to combat the state’s mounting demographic issues.
“For some, the costs are so insurmountable young people are even deciding to not even start a family.”
Many critics of legislative measures like this aimed to improve birth rates across the U.S. say deeper, more systemic issues need to be addressed to assure people they’ll be able to adequately care for children. Young people cite both economic and sociopolitical instability as reasons to forego having kids. To that end, many raise concerns about threats to social programs like child care, education, and healthcare.
Nevertheless, for working families, every penny counts. Tomlinson even expressed hope that the bills could help the state’s pet population as well.
“Hopefully this may even encourage more Pennsylvania families to welcome a new pet into their lives,” said Tomlinson.
Pet food is currently exempt in the District of Columbia.
Baby products are exempted by similar legislation in some other states, like Minnesota, Florida, and neighboring Maryland. School supplies are frequently the subject of sales tax holidays, which some states enact exempting items for a specific window of time.
While giving families an added boost, new exemptions pose a significant challenge to retailers who would need to identify and change items within their existing inventory. While many stores do use category-based systems, they rarely coincide with new legislative requirements around sales tax.
Parsing out products by intended age-range has proven to be an especially difficult task in Florida where laws intended to encourage family growth have called out attributes not generally used in point of sale systems.
