Bills target Pennsylvania tax laws from the 1930s
HARRISBURG – During the legislative doldrums of summer, Pennsylvania legislators take an opportunity to do some tidying up.
This time, it’s throwing out obsolete tax laws that haven’t been active since the 1930s.
A proposal from Rep. Ann Flood, R-Pen Argyl, would take the Emergency Relief Sales Tax, discontinued in 1933, off the books. Rep. Tim Twardzik, R-Frackville, says the 1921 Anthracite Coal Tax Statute Act, which was last implemented in 1931, should follow suit.
The former taxed the sale of tangible property, while the latter levied 1.5% per ton of mined, washed and screened coal ready for market.
In 2024, an analysis from the Mercatus Center of George Mason University ranked Pennsylvania the14th-most regulated state.
With more than 164,000 regulatory restrictions on the books, the commonwealth focuses more on areas like environmental protection, culture and the arts, and administration than other states – but much less in areas like health services, banking, insurance, and securities.
But the commonwealth was not the worst of its over-burdened neighbors. New York and New Jersey ranked second and third, respectively, with Ohio sixth, and Maryland at 21st. West Virginia was not ranked in the study.
“Jurisdictions that allow regulations to consistently pile up over the years experience slower economic growth, but this effect can be reversed when policymakers actively cut red tape,” the Mercatus Center’s Patrick McLaughlin and Dustin Chambers say. “Policymakers can reduce the harm of excessive regulation by improving the management of their rulemaking systems, thereby making it more likely that the rules on the books actually solve the problems they were intended to solve.”
Though right-wing thinkers and politicians tend to talk more about overregulation and the need to reduce red tape, Mercatus pointed to a left-wing success story: British Columbia in Canada.
There, they credit leaders as being pioneers in getting rid of red tape.
“Its economic growth rate increased by one percentage point because it cut regulations by nearly 40%,” McLaughlin and Chambers said. “Several U.S. states have attempted to follow suit, including Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia.”
