Pop quiz: A progressive city institutes a 9.7% sales tax.  How much tax revenue does it lose on shoplifted goods?

It's a good question, one that needs to be properly researched, answered, and thrown in the face of the tax-and-spend liberals.

When an item is shoplifted, the local taxing authority cannot collect sales tax on that item.  The stolen item also contributes to the store's shrinkage, making the company less profitable...and subject to smaller income tax that the state can collect.

Most of the items stolen are resold — sometimes online, sometimes on the street in front of the store the item was stolen from.  No sales tax is collected on the sale of the stolen items.

Although the stolen items are sold at a significant discount, the profit margin for the thief is 100%.  Despite the huge profit margin, shoplifting rings probably don't file tax returns on the income made from the sale of stolen merchandise.  And yet another chance for tax collection is bypassed.

If the shoplifter is selling the item right outside the store it was stolen from (this is happening in Chicago and San Francisco), the government misses yet another taxing opportunity when the thief sells to someone who was on his way to buy the item legitimately.

When the store goes out of business because of shoplifting, the city loses property tax and all sales tax, and the state loses income tax from the corporation and from the laid off employees and managers.

When stores fire employees for reporting shoplifting, they help the shoplifter cheat the government even more by taking away income tax revenue in addition to the lost sales tax.

Retail theft is tax evasion.  Can governments that have huge unfunded pensions (like Illinois) really afford to ignore the loss of tax revenue from retail theft?

Refusal to prosecute retail theft is the equivalent of using tax dollars to fund organized retail theft gangs.  The big-city liberals might as well be collecting money from working people and handing big bundles of cash to everyone who is in jail.

The government has 48,000 new, armed IRS agents.  Perhaps they should be out busting people who are evading taxes...like shoplifters.

Image: Fastly.