Amazon To Pay Texas Sales Tax 274
An anonymous reader writes "The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Amazon.com will soon start collecting sales tax from buyers in state of Texas. 'Seattle-based Amazon, which had $34 billion in sales in 2010, has long opposed collecting taxes. That has drawn fire from state governments facing budget shortfalls and from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, who say online sellers essentially give customers an automatic discount when they don’t collect taxes. Combs has estimated the state loses $600 million a year from untaxed online sales. However, Amazon has recently begun making deals with a number of states to collect sales tax. Those deals have usually included a one- to three-year window exempting Amazon from sales tax collection.'"
Location based? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Note to all governments (Score:2, Interesting)
Texas hardly has a reputation for being profligate in its spending, and this does not increase the tax burden on anyone in the state. Texas already has a use tax set at an equal rate to sales tax and payable on purchases brought into the state, such as those from Amazon.
It's a lot easier for states to stay in their budget if they can make sure every taxpayer is picking up his or her own share.
If your argument is that taxes should be lower, that's a separate issue altogether and one for the political process to resolve. If Texans would prefer fewer services in return for lower taxes, I'm pretty sure they have the option of voting for that.
Fair? (Score:4, Interesting)
How can they just collect taxes from one online store and leave the other million alone?
Seems like a unfair advantage and completely illegal to boot.
Re:A red state raising taxes!!??!!!??? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Fair tax is anything but.
Useful sales tax spending isn't linear by income. Everybody pays the same sales tax on Cable, telephone, etc. if you make $1 million then those expenses aren't 50x more than the average guy. Not to mention payroll taxes that are flat like social security (7% from employee and employer uo to $110k) or Medicare 2% of income... There is about 20% of taxes taken from your pay outside "income tax" just for getting paid.
Realize that the very rich people live off capital gains and interest income... None of THOSE taxes are taken out before the puny little 15% capital gains. They don't SPEND anywhere near the proportion of there income on personal effects that a regular person has to.
Re:A red state raising taxes!!??!!!??? (Score:5, Interesting)
How does it increase compliance? Unless you force everything to electronic transaction (and watch the privacy advocates on /. have a fit about that). It doesn't increase compliance, it eases it, those are two different things. I'm not an american, but I believe for out purposes I face a similar problem. My income is derived from 3 sources, work, scholarships, and research grants. My work income is obvious enough. Scholarships aren't taxable, again, obvious enough, but they do count towards total family income for certain low income benefits, and different benefits may or may not count them. Research grants are taxable, after expenses, and what is a valid expense can involve dozens of pages of paperwork.
If they were all just 'income' that would significantly ease my compliance costs, because I don't have to spend 8 or 9 hours every year reading through this years rules and sorting out all of the various ways those rules apply.
But that doesn't mean it increases compliance. In fact, with higher point of sales taxes it's in my interest to not declare purchases or sales of services to the government, since that could cut down costs for my customers and myself by 20% (if I was in the EU for example), and it would give me a competitive advantage over a big company that can't do that. Which is exactly what happens in Italy and Greece, and is presumably now happening in spain. Those huge masses of 'unemployed' people in spain and greece aren't just sitting around posting on /. all day. They're working under the table so to speak, and of course, unreliably. Cash transactions facilitate this because they aren't traceable.
Fundamentally the US, Canadian and a few other systems assume tax payers are trying to be honest. That's as flawed an assumption for the "Fair Tax" as it is for the existing income tax structures. Some countries happen to be more honest, or coerced into compliance through the use of credit cards and mobile phone payments etc. (e.g. Japan and Sweden) and some are quite happy to do business in cash under the table, for everything (Italy, Greece, India, Bangladesh). Making it easier for people to comply doesn't mean they will, and the more 'in your face' the tax is, the more likely people are to try and dodge it.
Re:A red state raising taxes!!??!!!??? (Score:3, Interesting)
It is all a bunch of feel-good nonsense designed to distract from the core objective of anything that remotely resembles a Fair Tax: to pillage the middle class and line the pockets of the rich.
Are you claiming that now, without a Fair Tax, the middle class are not being pillaged and the pockets of the rich are not being lined? I'm not an American and don't know the merits or otherwise of this tax proposal, but I'm curious what you think is in place now that will prevent the pillaging of the middle class and prevent the pockets of the rich being lined?