Amazon Pushes For National Internet Sales Tax 392
SonicSpike writes "The Governor of Tennessee struck a deal with Amazon.com to allow their operations to move to TN in exchange for Amazon.com not having to collect TN sales tax for the next 2 years. However the Governor noted in his press conference that he is working with Amazon.com to push the US federal government to impose a national Internet sales tax."
Openned article ... (Score:2)
Re:Openned article ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nevada has Las Vegas. The feds need Nevada more than Nevada needs them.
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And the State of CT has no open container law (passengers can freely drink on moving vehicles) in exchange for sacrificing highway funds.
I don't know if it's true for all states, but in CT, the funds are still received from the Feds, but must be used on anti-DUI advertising.
make it opt-in for states (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:make it opt-in for states (Score:5, Informative)
If it was only 50 it would be trivial to implement. The problem is most States allow individual counties to collect an additional percentage. There are 3,077 counties in the United States, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. On top of that, many municipalities also have the option of collecting an additional sales tax.
Add in that sales taxes vary depending on the type of item purchased, and in some cases county/city surtaxes are limited by the dollar amount of the purchase, and you end up with one hell of a convoluted mess if you deal nationwide.
For details see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Re:make it opt-in for states (Score:4, Informative)
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A former employer was working with a Russian-based software company to introduce their restaurant POS system to the US. They were appalled that there were such things as local taxes that varied from one community to another, they were going to have to re-write the entire tax module to accommodate it. Delayed the product too long and they abandoned the effort, since in the meantime a whole slew of cheap POS systems (including the one from MS) had hit the market.
So, in short, the tax system worked in this case - protecting domestic industry from foreign competition.
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That was more reasonable in the days of catalog sales, these days we have these things called "databases" in which people can store records and information. I suggest businesses could rent access or create their own, and then have that problem more or less dealt with.
The whole notion that it's somehow prohibitively expensive or complicated to keep track of is just an excuse in most cases to get an unfair pricing advantage over brick and mortar stores.
Affordable? (Score:2)
That was more reasonable in the days of catalog sales, these days we have these things called "databases" in which people can store records and information. I suggest businesses could rent access or create their own
But how would small businesses afford what the companies providing such databases (and updates to such databases in response to ongoing legislation and regulation) would charge?
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And who keeps these up to date? Maybe if some open source project wants to go about collecting all the relevant information and makes it available for free, then I'd agree with you. Most of the places you can get the data now charge quite alot with yearly (and sometimes monthly) updates.
A small business I worked with has under $1000 a year to provide online sales with, which must include hosting costs and the price to maintain their site. They certainly can't afford any current tax databases and saying 'If
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Exactly. Sales tax are setup for brick and mortar stores. You pay the sales tax based on where you buy the item with an exception made for cars in many places.
And you are correct in that if it was just 50 states that it wouldn't be a problem it is every county and town. This is easy to deal with for brick and mortar but a pain for online.
For instance do you charge the tax based where your server is at? If so a lot of datacenters will pop up in Oregon, Montana, and New Hampshire. The billing address or the c
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I feel there is a simple solution. If states could adopt a special sales tax for online purchases primarily. Here is how it'd work.
It'd have a special sales tax code for when filed. The sales tax rate would be based on the average sales tax rate for the state. Gross sales tax revenue divided by gross receipts, excluding online purchases. And the business must not have a nexus within the state in order to opt into this.
So maybe it works out to 8.1%. Then if a business sells something to someone in that state
Re:make it opt-in for states (Score:5, Informative)
3077 counties! Oh lordy! How would we keep track of so many different taxes? That would take either a big piece of paper, or several, even! Too bad there isn't a better way of keep track of lists of things...
First of all its by municipality, not county. Individual cities have different rates here.
Ah that's easy, once you have the data. How do you get the data? The expensive part is keeping track of the endless seemingly random changes. Is soda a tax free food or taxable luxury good in that city? How bout energy drinks?
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3077 counties! Oh lordy! How would we keep track of so many different taxes? That would take either a big piece of paper, or several, even! Too bad there isn't a better way of keep track of lists of things...
As others said, it's not just a list of Zipcode1 == 7%, Zipcode2 == 6%, etc. That's not TOO bad unless it gets broken down by sections/streets of a town/zip, and then you have to make sure some central database is 100% up-to-date. It's probably easier to get updates from big areas than smaller communities.
But... different communities/states have different sets of rules. Oh, for ZipCodeZ food items are an additional 1%, if the price is over $x then it's another 1%, etc. Not every community, but a lot.
In
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It's worse than you think. Zipcodes are for the convenience of the postal service. They do not follow municipal boundaries. You have to get more granular than that.
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As a sibling commentator has noted, zip codes don't always map to boundaries, especially when those boundaries can change, as they just did in my county. Up to a certain address on a neighboring street, you're in the city, and city taxes apply. Restaurants, for example, now are charged a handful of new taxes. But on this same street, you can also be outside of the city. No new sales / income / etc. taxes. The address even has the town name in it. Somewhere someone would have had to log all these changes and
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3077 counties! Oh lordy! How would we keep track of so many different taxes? That would take either a big piece of paper, or several, even! Too bad there isn't a better way of keep track of lists of things...
It also varies by the type of product or service being sold. I'm most familiar with restaurant-related sales taxes (I helped develop a Point-of-Sale system used throughout the country), and there are places that tax differently depending on the specific product (i.e. milk and soda have different sales tax rates). There are places that have different sales tax rates based on whether you eat the food at the restaurant or take it out of the restaurant.
In the real world, each business charges sales taxes base
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And yet stores like Wal-mart have no problem collecting sales tax from these thousands of different sales tax jurisdictions.
That's because each store only has to deal with one sales tax structure, not thousands.
The reality is that physical stores charge the sales tax of the seller's location, not the buyer's location. That may not be the intent of the law, but that's the way it actually works.
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Yes, but Walmart.com does deal with the thousands without a lick of trouble.
I like how (Score:2)
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Check out Utah, the Nigeria of America. All the bullshit health product & MLM scams operate from there.
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Wait, I'm sorry, I must apologize. That was unfair to Nigeria which at least tried to shut down it's scams.
Here is why its good (Score:2, Informative)
tl;dr, version:
Online shops already have a lot fewer expenses, if they don't have to pay sales tax like brick and mortar stores have to, those stores close. Less tax is paid, there is less money to run a decent human society and you are fucked (unless you are one of the rich who doesn't give a crap about ordinary people)
Oh, and clearly Amazon is not in favor of this, evidently they are in favor of paying no taxes anywhere, because they don't care that much about supporting society, beyond selling people cra
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Stores don't pay sales tax (Score:3, Insightful)
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Less tax is paid, there is less money to run a decent human society
Ah that is the core argument, not sales tax or not sales tax. How do those internet ordered goods arrive? UPS? Doesn't UPS pay a tax? If you want parcel insurance, doesn't it cost more based on the value of the parcel?
I'm thinking its a heck of a lot simpler to collect tax on a per-delivery route basis from a handful of shipping companies, than from "everyone who could theoretically sell something on ebay" basis.
If you live in a state with no sales tax... (Score:2)
Easily averted (Score:2)
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No one tells the Congress what to do, but that's not the point of the Internet sales tax. It's to give cover to Amazon for their aggressive tax avoidance schemes. They keep saying that it will stop that nonsense if there was only an Internet sales tax, knowing full well there will never be such a thing. It let's them act like a good corporate citizen without actually being one.
I don't know why they fight taxes on all levels so much. Likely some sort of psychosis.
Solves some big problems, creates new small ones.. (Score:5, Informative)
If you've ever looked at the patchwork of sales tax rules in this country you can quickly see this solves a major problem. There are literally 10's of thousands of sales tax jurisdictions in the US, pretty much every county at a minimum, and often each city or town inside of the county. It's not just different rates, but also different rules. Food is taxed in one place, taxed at a different rate in another, and not taxed in a third. And what is "food"? You don't really want to know the answer to that question, it's probably 10,000 pages long! Having one rate, or perhaps one national base rate and a per state "option"; but more importantly one set of classification rules would really solve a major hurdle for small online retailers, and make it practical for them to collect tax.
The largest problem this creates is who gets the revenue? Taxes generally pay for infrastructure (roads, bridges, fire departments, etc), so it makes sense for some of the revenue to go where the seller is located, and some where the buyer is located. In brick and mortar sales these tend to be the same place, but won't be for Internet sales. Plus, Internet sales depend on transportation. The goods are shipped by truck and rail, probably across many states in the middle. Some of the money needs to go to those states to build interstates and airports and rail yards to get the goods from seller to buyer.
There are some other small problems. For instance if the money is collected and distributed via the fed, can it be used as a stick to get the states to do other things? The tax may be regressive, depending on how it is implemented. Many localities exempt food for instance as a means of assisting the poor, squaring those rules into a national set of rules will be difficult.
Still, overall I think the country needs something like this to happen. The idea that we can collect no taxes on a significant fraction of the business activity is just crazy. Many other countries already have a VAT tax because of issues like this, so the US is really falling behind. No one likes taxes, but we all like the things taxes achieve (on some level), so let's find the simplest, least evil, and fairest way to collect them. Going from 10,000+ sets of rules and rates down to 1 would be a huge step.
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There's definitely no longer any validity to the 90's moratoriums, as there's no longer anything nascent or emerging about internet retail that needs protection.
On the broader issue of taxes, if it were even possible to overcome all the vested interests to do a ground-up redesign of taxation in this country, it would only make sense for the state to be the single point of contact for a taxpayer. The state can distribute money to counties, and the federal government could tax the states, in an arrangement t
what is the point? (Score:2)
How about we come up with a way to elect someone other than narcissistic sociopaths into office? Then we can worry about the minutae. Seriously, all this talk of taxes and policy seems so pointless with the crop of miseryshits we have in office.
Inaccurate headline? (Score:3)
Amazon is NOT pushing for a national sales tax! This article is about Governor Haslam's agenda, not Amazon's. The headline is inaccurate and misleading.
No, no, and hell no. (Score:2)
Fuck off Tennessee.
Big deal for TN. (Score:2)
Tennessee has no income tax, so it relies on its almost 10% sales tax for a lot of its revenue.
So, yes, this is a big deal for them.
However, if this actually happens, I can see a cottage industry growing of sales tax databases. This would also include when states have "tax holidays", where there is no sales tax on certain items.
I don't get the argument, though, that it would be too complicated. All nationwide retail stores do it. It's just one more thing to deal with as a business owner.
Of course TN supports internet sales tax (Score:2)
Lol @ politicians not understanding polotics (Score:2)
Again, on what basis an internet tax? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's crazy to so much of the leftward-leaning slashdot crowd, but is it so crazy to ask WHY a tax would be justified before implementing ANOTHER method of the government intruding into the otherwise-private transactions between people?
(And please note: our elected representatives being too stupid for several decades to balance a checkbook and spend less than they have available ISN'T ipso facto a valid reason to take more money from the public.)
To lay it out clearly:
- in terms of hard infrastructure, everything has already been paid for. There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store. Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
- I don't see the government providing any specific security for internet transactions; there's no government-security function backing https, nor any other transaction security system with an official imprimatur. I'm fine with this, by the way, I'm just saying that one of the legitimate reasons we pay taxes is the security and stable society under which the transaction is able to occur. This isn't present, as far as I can tell, on the internet.
- sure there are some internet investigations going on but I see these as other issues - I don't see a lot of prosecutions for internet fraud (could just be my ignorance), certainly nothing to justify the massive amount of cash that would be garnered from a broadly-asserted internet sales tax.
In short, simply because the government needs money, and can take it, doesn't mean we need to tolerate it blithely like sheep.
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There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store.
Maybe your Amazon purchases are delivered by teleportation, but mine come via UPS or USPS. They use trucks, the kind that travel on roads. They often come to my city via planes that fly in airspace regulated by the FAA.
Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
Yeah, thank god the government invented the internet so they don't ever have to invent anything ever again. We can stop paying taxes now because we've reached the end-of-days. Nope, no new ideas the government could fund with our tax dollars today.
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
What about other forms of fraud like cred
That would be great if every state had a sales tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Except there are states that don't. We like our "no sales tax" in Oregon. Screw you, Tennessee.
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And we like our "no income tax" in Tennessee. Screw you, Oregon.
One way or the other you're going to pay the piper, and having one national standard will make things much easier for all concerned.
Clearly wrong-headed (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who lives in one of the two states with no sales tax, this idea can go screw itself.
As someone who believes sales taxes are regressive and unfair, I can say that my fondest hope is that the internet finally forces the rest of the states to eliminate their unfair sales taxes and I welcome Amazon to move to my state and just tell everyone demanding sales taxes to fornicate themselves with an iron stick.
Re:Federal Sales Tax (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only that, but yet another tax to collect for the feds, thus creating an operational barrier to entry for new enterprise.
It's not a barrier it's an assistance (Score:5, Insightful)
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The laws are already in place. It sucked when buy.com and newegg.com opened fulfillment centers here cause suddenly, tax. I wonder if they will have a case for equal treatment.
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Which isn't really that hard unless you're a small business owner in which case you probably just pay for the service. Large companies shouldn't have any trouble keeping track of that, especially a business the size of Amazon, I can't imagine that it takes more than 1 full time employee, and I'd be surprised if it even requires that much time and energy.
Considering that many companies can figure out how much shipping should cost to various places, it shouldn't be that much harder to plug the address into an
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45 may not be, but the US has far more than just 50 (+/- a few for territories etc.) different tax codes. Each locality has its own tangled web of taxes and fees. Depending on the industry, it can be quite complicated for a small or maybe even medium business if they don't farm the work out.
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And yet these same businesses seem to have no trouble figuring out how to game the tax code to reduce their taxes.
Also, I specifically pointed out that they could and likely would farm out the work. If it's really that prohibitive they could always just put the same sort of exemption in for small businesses that they typically do on other things.
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As Zach the Lizard says. In my state, each county sets it's own sales tax rate. And, the cities can add another percentage or two. There might be a 20 cent difference in the total amount due on a ten dollar purchase, in two different locations. The state limits how high the sales taxes can go, but the counties actually set those tax rates.
It's Rules that's the problem not Rate (Score:3)
It's not the rate that needs to be uniform, merely the administration and rules. It would be quite possible to have a federal sales tax, with collection outsourced to the states and rate dependant on delivery address. The issue is when every municipality has their own tax and more importantly rules for applying that tax. It's this abundance of differing rules and regulations which make doing business across territories difficult, rates on the other hand can be determined by a simple lookup table.
The othe
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EVERY competitor has the same disadvantage
There's no sales tax here in NH, nor in a few other States. Amazon is trying to disadvantage all Internet businesses in these States? I doubt the Tennessee Governor's report is entirely accurate.
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No sales tax in Oregon either, so companies based here have no legal compulsion to collect them, keep track of them, or any such device.
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As a resident of Alaska I've only filed federal taxes. Nice to see that you enjoy regressive taxation, but we really appreciate the lack of it. I would even opine that sales taxes should not ever be levied.
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But even if the state can't collect the sales tax automatically, they can still charge you the citizen a Use Tax. There's probably a line on your state income tax form for it. But people don't know or care a
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Well, precisely. It's easy to say "national sales tax," in fact (I just said it). But how's it going to be allocated back to the states? Why should all the purchasing from, say Chicago, subsidize roads in a little town in Mississippi? It's all nice and collegial, but note that the roads in Chicago would be severely underfunded. TFA does have very many details ( infact, it has none), so is this another sensational headline out of a non-story?
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It's not a troll, I seriously don't really get the idea of a single country being run by so many independant states as the US seems to be. Here in the UK there are National Routes and Local Routes, with the local routes paid for out of Council Tax and a share of the nationally collected Income Tax, although there are arguments for getting rid of Council Tax in favour of either a Land Tax or a more direct share of Inco
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
...why is national infrastructure paid for at a local level?
It isn't. National infrastructure (Interstate highways, for instance) is paid for directly by federal (national) funding.
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I guess the next question then is, why does Sales Tax matter so much? I know Income Tax is lower in the US than the UK, but do the individual States not get any of that funding? Is there no equivalent of Council Tax (i.e. a tax collected solely for the use of the state)?
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In addition to the national income tax, most states have their own state income tax. In addition to that most, have property taxes, school taxes (also paid by property owners). Counties, towns, and other localities can also levy their own property taxes and sales taxes.
The national income tax goes directly to the federal government (which they then use to bribe the states into passing laws they can't pass nationally), everything else is local to the state and/or municipalities.
When you add everything up, I'
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Further, county roads and city streets are funded by the county or the city that possesses that roadway. I live a quarter mile from a state highway. The federal government offers no funding for the maintenance of that highway. The county road (dirt road) on which I actually live, is maintained by a county employee, with a county owned road grader. And, the county roads that are paved are maintained by a couple of crews of county employees, again with county owned equipment, and county material.
Only in
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I guess the next question then is, why does Sales Tax matter so much?
Afaict the issue with sales tax and internet purchases in the US is not just the actual tax loss but also the fact that it gives retailers who sell to the whole US but only have a buisness presense in the odd state (preferablly states without sales tax) a massive unfair advantage over traditional retailers that have a buisness presense in most states. In theory people are supposed to pay an equivilent "use tax" to make up for the sales tax they didn't pay but afaict they rarely actually did so and some stat
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unless you're Billy Bob the town sheriff. Then you can get millions of dollars in DHS money to buy machine guns.
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Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a troll, I seriously don't really get the idea of a single country being run by so many independant states as the US seems to be.
Umm... Aren't you guys a member of the EU? You're just now seeing the beginning of how Federal and state powers and responsibilities manifested in US history. Shortly after the unpleasantness with the your Crown, the thirteen states banded together in something very like the EU under the Articles of Confederation. It became clear after a time that the Articles were insufficient to bound the states together, much as it is becoming clear that something more substantial may be needed in Europe (at the least many member states are concerned about how much everyone's economic policy diverges). So we upgraded the capabilities of the Federal government in the Constitution. Over the next two hundred years the States and the Fed (and the locals and the states) have maneuvered, pushed, and pulled (and in part fought a war) into the current system. The Federal Government's power have increased substantially over that time, but the states rather jealously guard what they have left.
The answer to your more immediate question of why local governments are building national infrastructure, the answer is they don't. States do. States are not local governments. Even ignoring the history above, remember that the US is relatively huge vs. the UK. England (indeed, the entire island including Scotland and Wales) would fit into some of our larger states. A certain level of mid tier government between "national" and "local" makes sense. Typically states maintain the larger roads (sometimes with mostly their own funding, called "state roads"; sometime with additional federal money called "federal roads" or "Interstates"), and local governments maintain the smaller local roads. State and local governments get a lot of their funding from sales tax (like your VAT, but collected at the local and state level). So the issues here are:
1) It's hard for states and localities to collect sales on interstate mail order purchases (as throughout the Internet). They are pushing to legally require this on any business which operates inside their borders. This is becoming a larger and larger issue as online ordering becomes a larger part of the retail profile of many people.
2) Sales tax rates vary extremely from state to state and locality to locality. I live in Massachusetts, we have like a 7% sales tax. It's higher in Boston which collects a local tax on top of the state tax. An hour north of me is New Hampshire which has no sales tax at all. Amazon and some other online retailers claim that this makes sales tax collection unduly complicated for them, so they want a national sales tax.
3) The difficulty presented by the OP is a real one. If the Feds start to collect a national sales tax on online orders as a proxy for states and localities how can you fairly divide up the proceeds. Should every state just get a percentage based on population? How's that work when many more people in say California or Massachusetts are much more likely to shop online than people in Mississippi? How do you handle getting local governments their share? Should people in states like New Hampshire, that have no state sales tax, have to pay? Should those states get any of the proceeds?
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"why is national infrastructure paid for at a local level?"
it's not all like that.
each state gets Federal funds for things like interstate highways (those roads which cross state borders) - similar to your National Routes, I imagine.
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> But how's it going to be allocated back to the states?
Easy: national sales tax goes to fund the FBI and ATF, and every state gets the privilege to have federal agents coming down to burn alive members of religious cults suspected to also be gun runners.
Every state would benefit from a better funded federal government. More money would fund more illegal wiretaps of civil rights leaders. Or it could simply be put in a savings account for the next war or bailout that the federal government creates to plea
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divided by sales?
tax on goods shipped (or billed?) to Illinois goes to Illinois?
"national" doesn't necessarily mean it goes to the Fed, it could just mean a common rate.
kinda sucks for Oregon (no sales tax) but could be good for California where sales tax is almost 10%
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Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
To hell with the virtual - why the frig should those of us living in states with no sales taxes in the real world (Oregon) have to pay up for everyone else's, and since when would we be forced to start paying one?
Dunno about you, but it would pretty much change buying habits for most purchases around here. Sure, some things would still be cheaper online after figuring in shipping costs and (now this proposed) sales tax, but things online would end up being far less attractive than before... including a lot of Amazon's stock.
OTOH, maybe it'd be the push needed to support local (offline) business more?
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No doubt it would negatively affect Amazon, but how would the taxes be used?
Personally, I buy stuff at Amazon mostly for convenience and even if prices were higher than local stores, I would still shop at Amazon.
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Naturally, I can't speak for anyone else. But, when I'm shopping IRL and online, the sales tax (or lack thereof) doesn't even enter into the equation. Consider electronics and computer parts and peripherals. I simply cannot get the stuff I want/need locally. If I want the cheap crap that WalMart stocks, I can get that, of course. Very limited selection, at the very bottom of the quality spectrum. That carries over into very many other needs and wants. I simply can't get things, locally. So - I searc
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If he is really REALLY hurt, well, then Ceiling Cat will come. Or Basement Cat.
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Because Amazon doesn't have a physical presence there and they struck the deal as a prerequisite for moving facilities there. Which ought to be blatantly illegal as it's essentially an agreement to turn a blind eye to tax evasion so Amazon will move to the state.
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Which is why income tax has the 16th Amendment. No commerce clause needed.
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We never get rid of taxes, we just add more, and more, and more........
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That would be my preferred option, but ever since SCOTUS threw ours out in the '30s we haven't been able to get one by the legislature or voters.
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Sales tax is the only useful way to tax companies on. If you taxes revenue, middlemen would mean multiple taxation, by keeping the tax at point-of-sale the tax is only paid once and the cost of it is spread up through price-pressure to all of the involved companies. Tax on profit is even more useless as profit can easily be redefined by accountants, which means ordinary company tax is only paid by small companies with poor accountants.
Or are you under the false assumption sales-tax are meant as a tax on con
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The feds are pretty damn good at collecting taxes. It's the one thing they really try to get right. Gotta hand it to 'em.
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We need fewer taxes and a smaller government.
A national internet sales tax would give us fewer taxes and less government. It would replace dealing with thousands of redundant individual local tax rates and authorities with a single system.
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I would argue exactly the opposite. All taxes are bad, but an income tax is perhaps the worst type as it is an outright presumption of slavery, that the government owns the fruits of our labor, and thus owns us... Allowing us to keep whatever percentage of our income. Income tax needs to end entirely.
Property tax is also wrong. It is a presumption that government owns all property (in this case, all land and homes). Once you purchase property it should be yours and yours alone. This country was founded on i
Re:seems to solve an obvious problem (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon would collect and remit the payment to State B. Sales tax is collected against where the customer is at. This has be the law of the land for decades. It was settled when the Amazon was a Sears and Roebucks catalog.
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Amazon would collect and remit the payment to State B. Sales tax is collected against where the customer is at.
Apparently, you didn't read the post you replied to, in which there is some question as to "where the customer is at".
If you pay Amazon with a credit card that has a billing address in New Jersey, but have the order shipped to a verified address in Texas, where is "the customer"? If they are in Texas at the time the order is made, then Texas (state "C" in the OP) has a strong case for the customer being there.
Likewise, I pay for purchases from Newegg using PayPal, so Newegg has no clue where I "am". All t
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We really don't. The article summary was skewed, and the title is just plain incorrect. Title should be
"Tenn. Governor pushes for National Internet Sales Tax" with a note in the summary he's discussing it with Amazon. Discussion does not equate to agreement.