Meet the Editor
David Brunori, a contributing editor of State Tax Notes magazine, teaches state and local tax law at George Washington University. Previously, he practiced with a Washington, D.C., law firm specializing in tax litigation and served as an appellate trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a recent interview with Richard Deutsch at the Urban Institute, Mr. Brunori spoke about how current economic trends may force states to change the way they raise revenue:
Brunori:
Change is coming. The landscape has changed considerably in the last several years, and there's really two things going on. One is the world economy is changing. The state tax systems were all developed at a time when we had a manufacturing base, and we had relatively little international trade, and commerce consisted of exchange of tangible personal property...buying things. Now, that's changed considerably. Now we're really a service dominated economy with a global reach. The second thing that's going on, and it's related to how we conduct business in this country and around the world, is the explosion in electronic commerce. A lot of those services that influenced traditional state tax systems to begin with are moving from being conducted in person or over the mail to being conducted electronically. That's going to force states to do some serious thinking about how they're going to collect revenue in the future.
