What is Chicago’s real sales tax rate?

Chicago’s Sales Tax rate is 10.25% as of today.  It’s not great, and I’m not in any way excited about it, but it’s got me to wondering: what is Chicago’s real sales tax rate?  There are a bunch of exceptions and then there’s all of the Amazon, Zappos and other online shopping expenditures that don’t collect sales tax.

So if you take:

Total Sales Tax Collection

and divide it by

Total Potentially Taxable Purchases

Then you get what our real sales tax rate is.

But the problem is that with all these complexities and exceptions and ins and outs, no one has any idea what the true effective rate is.  Which means we can’t really have much of a true conversation about sales tax.

It’s frustrating.

And the extremely cynical part of me wonders if that’s not the idea.

And that’s a real problem.