Why Amazon Fights State Sales Tax, But Supports It Nationally 165
cagraham writes "The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Amazon will begin charging customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin sales tax today, after fighting against it for years. Amazon now charges sales tax in 16 states, affecting roughly 163 million Americans. Yet despite Amazon's continued fight against sales tax on the state-level, they support a Senate bill that would allow all states to tax online retailers. It seems like a contradiction, but it's actually a calculated move to undercut rivals like eBay (who would have a far harder time dealing with sales tax laws), and even an unequal playing field (many states that tax Amazon don't tax other online retailers)."
Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
Is anyone actually surprised about this? Of course Amazon did this to hurt it's competition. It's also why they sell books at far below other places. It's not because they care about you, it's because they want to drive out everyone else.
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*Its* competition, I should have said.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Amazon did this to hurt it's competition.
Of course, but that doesn't make them wrong. Taxes should be fair. If I buy something, the tax on it shouldn't depend on who I bought it from, or where they are located. Capitalism works best when companies compete to deliver value to their customers, rather than competing to avoid taxes.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you define "fair?" Is it fair, for example, that I can drive across my state line and buy groceries and clothes and pay no sales tax? Shouldn't my state be allowed to compete by lowering or eliminating their own sales taxes?
Gasoline tax is also lower in my neighboring state, and I buy gas there whenever I can. Most of my driving is in my own state, causing wear-and-tear on the roads that's not being paid for by my gas tax. Is that unfair?
Avoiding taxes is one factor companies consider when deciding to locate somewhere. It's also a tool states can use when competing with each other to lure businesses to locate there. That seems pretty fair to me.
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Check your state laws. In almost every case, if a state charges sales tax then that state *also* has a use tax. The use tax is negated by paying your state's sales tax.
Otherwise, the use tax applies. It typically applies to anything purchased out of state (or that has been purchased but your state's sales tax hasn't been paid, if your state's sales tax would have applied to that purchase) that is put into use in your state.
Buying dinner out of state and consuming it out of state? No use tax due to your home
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Having lived in a "use tax" state... it's pretty much unenforced.
It's next to impossible to enforce even if they tried. I don't think they try. Unless you're a fairly decent sized business importing materials and goods from out of state.
Average American I bet has no idea what a 'use tax' is, and even less declare it on their state taxes.
I ran a small business in that state for several years, and we never paid use tax on anything we bought online for our business. No one noticed, no one cared.
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Oh I agree, 'use tax' is pretty gosh-darn silly.
I mean, if I go across a state line, buy a tank of gas, drive around a bit, then go home with half of it left..do I pay? What about a half-eaten dinner? It's just a goofball tax, which is why most people (despite the legality) don't even bother.
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So... if I want to sell you something and you're located in the US, you say I should pay US sales tax, even though my locality (Hong Kong) doesn't have a sales tax at all?
Doesn't sound exactly fair to me. And then I'm not even contemplating the nightmare of having to charge customers taxes, based on where they are located, and then manage to pay it to the relevant overseas governments.
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So... if I want to sell you something and you're located in the US, you say I should pay US sales tax, even though my locality (Hong Kong) doesn't have a sales tax at all?
Doesn't sound exactly fair to me. And then I'm not even contemplating the nightmare of having to charge customers taxes, based on where they are located, and then manage to pay it to the relevant overseas governments.
What actually tends to happen (based on experience with countries that do have national sales tax systems like VAT) is that as a foreign customer you don't pay the sales tax, but you instead have to pay any local import duties. Now, they might be zero in your country/area, but that's not the exporter's problem.
The other way that technically works is that you have to pay the sales taxes and you're free to take your business elsewhere. That's what happens if you buy the goods/services in person. (Again, you m
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I do not know the law, but would I be required to collect the VAT if I sold something to someone in England and shipped it to them? Would you support a law requiring online businesses in the U.S. to do so? If not, why do you support a law requi
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What I don't understand is why Amazon actually cares about that.
They are a company that is located in a certain location (well maybe a few), and they sell out of that one company, and thus have to pay sales tax for that very place they are. They'll have to figure out once how much that is, after that they're done. They don't sell in the location where the customer is.
Just like if you go to a book store, the brick and mortar type, you pay the sales taxes that depend on whatever that location happens to have
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What I don't understand is why Amazon actually cares about that. ... They are a company that is located in a certain location (well maybe a few)...
Amazon has warehouses in quite a few places. They want to have them everywhere, to facilitate same-day deliveries. Under the current system, that means they would have a presence in every state, meaning that they would always need to collect sales tax anyway (for customers in states with sales taxes). This hurts them much more than most online retailers, who generally have a presence in one or two states and only have to worry about sales taxes for those states. That's why Amazon wants sales tax to be colle
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When you're talking about completely independent jurisdictions then the tax is covered by trade treaties. You either need to pay import / export duties, or there is a treaty that waives them. Taxes in one jurisdiction don't apply to people in another. The situation in the EU, for example, is that member countries agree to waive all import duties on goods from each other, but in exchange they charge VAT on all sales, even those destined for export, at the same rate, and those rates are harmonised such tha
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I don't see why these various states can not simply charge VAT on all sales, even those destined for export to other states (like the EU does).
Also as long as they keep the VAT rates not too much different, there is not much incentive to buy from another state - increase in shipping cost due to longer distance should cancel out most such advantages, unless you're talking about 10 percentage point differences.
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If I buy something, the tax on it shouldn't depend on who I bought it from, or where they are located.
Of course it should be. Or are you saying you should pay the same tax to a small boutique store in littletown, usa that you'd pay to a large flagship store on 5th ave in NY? Just like the cost of living is different between small town America and NYC, the cost of providing services (fire, police, etc) to business in smalltown is less. So why should the taxes be the same?
wtf? (Score:2)
not really to hurt competition.
but a level playing field.. so others wouldn't tax the sales tax.
it's ridiculous how easy dodging the sales tax in usa has been. "oh but we're selling online!" yeah...
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it's ridiculous how easy dodging the sales tax in usa has been. "oh but we're selling online!" yeah...
It's not just online; all out-of-state sales (think "mail-order") have been that way since the country was formed. Online retail just makes "mail-order" much more convenient and commonplace. Sales tax is a matter of state law, and states have no jurisdiction to impose taxes or tax collection duties on anyone outside the state. Amazon wants to change that by making sales tax collection and reporting a matter of federal law rather than state law. Amazon supports this because they would have to collect sales t
Supreme court quote (Score:1, Troll)
I'm reminded of a supreme court quote:
The power to tax is the power to destroy.
For the record (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon has supported a national sales tax since the late 90s. Their position hasn't changed, just people's false memories.
They don't support having to figure out 10,000 taxing jurisdictions each with their own weird rules. And there is no justification for Amazon to collect sales tax below the state level anyway, unless they are shipping to a state where they have a presence or nexus.
The supreme court has already ruled on this in 1992, and their ruling was quite clear. So either Congress gets off their butts and passes a law, or Amazon can just keep fighting it out in district courts for years.
That does not absolve people from paying use tax, which most don't. But use tax was never meant for consumers, and states have little power to enforce it on anyone except businesses. So a national sales tax makes the most sense in this case, which is why Amazon supports it.
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The supreme court has already ruled on this in 1992, and their ruling was quite clear. So either Congress gets off their butts and passes a law, or Amazon can just keep fighting it out in district courts for years.
The Wikipedia article on the case you're referring to [wikipedia.org] indicates there has been some congressional action on the matter, or attempted action at least. I wouldn't count on this congress actually managing to get real legislation done, though...
Re:For the record (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't support having to figure out 10,000 taxing jurisdictions each with their own weird rules.
This x9000.
Back in the day I worked with a company that provided a very popular ecommerce shopping cart that online shops could use to easily peddle their goods online. I remember when they rolled out the ability to charge sales tax and OMG the nightmare it created for support. Because remember, it's not just the State sales tax, often individual cities and counties charge a tax, AND on top of that tax different items can be taxed at different rates, like alcohol and certain foods. We had a company that would automatically update the database of taxes for everywhere and we allowed the stores to put in their own rates but it didn't stop them from calling non-stop complaining that some places were too low or too high and they didn't want to figure out the rate themselves and blah blah blah
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Re:For the record (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at a cafe in Ontario, and we had so many tax rules that the company writing our POS software couldn't even get it to work properly.
It looked something like this:
Non-food items are charged 13% tax
Some non-food items are charged 5% tax
Most food items are charged 13% tax
Some food items are charged 5% tax
Other food items are tax free
If you spent less than $4 on certain food items, it was tax free
If you were buying "bakery" items (bagels, etc), then they were tax free if you were buying at least 6, but the total had to be under $4, and you couldn't buy a drink with it.
And this was just for a coffee shop.
I can see why Amazon would be willing to charge X% nationally, as long as they don't need to deal with crap like that.
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You think that's bad?
I worked at a cafe in Ontario, and we had so many tax rules that the company writing our POS software couldn't even get it to work properly.
That's still at the provincial (state) level. GP post already mentioned the stupidity of hundreds if not thousands of city/county/district-level sales and use taxes per state, each of which might have slightly different tax rules like you see in your cafe.
So if your POS software company is already having a hard time working at a provincial level, multiply that by up to the number of municipal areas to see how much worse it is in the US.
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You have to collect the correct taxes for every jurisdiction, but you submit them to the states, not to local jurisdictions. The state then distributes the funds according to the data in your filing.
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... now that sounds more than a little bit fishy.
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Re:For the record (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if you are saying our tax code should be set up the way you suggest, then I agree. But right now it is not set up in any manner where you can do that.
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They're not forced. to.
To have this tax collected for them, instead of trying and failing to collect a "use tax" as they do now, they would have to agree to this simplified system which is not burdensome on the small business collecting it.
Either the entities sharing the zip code agree, or they watch the revenue pile up on trust.
hawk
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A national sales tax will not happen - it is unconstitutional and a right reserved for states. Collecting sales tax on behalf of the states has been proposed, but some states don't collect sales tax and again, it probably would be struck down as unconstitutional based on state's rights to collect the tax.
And the reason you get between 2000 and 19000+ jurisdictions (depending on who you ask) that change daily is because taxes need to be collected in the location of the buyer if the business doesn't have a pr
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Income tax is unconstitutional as well. Yet, we have an IRS enforcing the collection of income taxes.
Whether a federal sales tax ever be enacted or not, that doesn't preclude an administrative agency enabling the states and local jurisdictions to collect their taxes. It could be set up in any number of ways.
Fact is, I suspect that sometime soon, online retailers WILL be collecting sales taxes, and that the funds will be distributed according to some really arcane formula that few of us can claim to really
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>Collecting sales tax on behalf of the states has
>been proposed, but some states don't collect sales
>tax and again, it probably would be struck down as
>unconstitutional based on state's rights to collect
>the tax.
Speaking as a lawyer . . .
you're just plain wrong on this.
The Supreme Court has made it clear that while states cannot force out of state entities to collect sales tax for them, it is for Congress to find a solution. It is not that states *cannot* tax the purchases, but that they can
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> interstate commerce
You mean intrastate commerce, that is, state governments are forbidden from creating barriers to interstate trade. That is the sole domain of the Federal government, and is the sole reason for the Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause is being abused to justify laws such as the AFA and is almost never used for its intended purpose.
Taxing out-of-state purchases is completely unconstitutional and anyone who remits such "user fees" is an illiterate moron, or one who has never read The C
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Stop treating your constitution like it is the Bible. Constitutions get amended all the time. When the world changes, laws need to follow.
And remitting tax too (Score:2)
Another big problem with all the different taxes is that you have to remit them all separately as well. If the states were organized well enough to be able to collect all the taxes for all the various organizations in the state, I guess that isn't horrible only 50 places to pay it to. However let's be realistic you are going to need to end up remitting taxes to individual counties and cities as well and that becomes a complete nightmare. You not only need to know how much tax to collect at each level, you n
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> I guess that isn't horrible only 50 places to pay it to.
Incorrect. Some states (NH) outlaw sales tax on most goods (there are some taxed items, such as prepared foods but that is a restaurant tax). Other states have hundreds of sales tax zones (Nevada for example). This creates huge interstate commerce barriers for the smaller players, which is why Amazon gave up the fight and is now lobbying for it. The end result is there is literally hundreds (if not thousands) of individual sales tax zones - and s
Haven't used Amazon in over a year (Score:2)
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There are other places to get stuff from where you don't have to pay the California extortion. B&H, J&R to name 2 off the top of my head.
I'd rather my money go to UPS and FED-Ex than the bozos in Sacramento.
Of course, you're still required to pay the tax even if the retailer doesn't collect it.
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> Of course, you're still required to pay the tax even if the retailer doesn't collect it.
Which is unconstitutional because it is a violation of the interstate commerce clause.
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> Of course, you're still required to pay the tax even if the retailer doesn't collect it.
Which is unconstitutional because it is a violation of the interstate commerce clause.
How is that unconstitutional? Are you saying that a state has no right to collect a tax from its citizens?
As far as I know, every state that collects a sales-tax for in-state purchases requires use-tax to be paid on out of state purchases, even you drive across the border to purchase items that you'll use in your home state (though in that case, you can typically take a credit for sales tax paid in that state).
Use-tax isn't new, California has had it on the books since the 1930's. So I think that it were tr
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In theory the state is taxing your use of the good within the state, not the interstate commerce itself. That's why they call it "use tax". Of course, they don't apply "use tax" if you've already paid sales tax, and the rates are always the same. It's an obvious technicality, but one they've managed to get away with.
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Maybe if the retailer did collect it I wouldn't buy it at all because I couldn't afford it?
That's pretty much the argument from brick and motar retailers for forcing online retailers to collect sales tax. Otherwise, if you can't afford it at Best Buy, you're more likely to buy from B&H because it's x% cheaper there without the sales tax. And for a big dollar item (the kind that's expensive for retailers to keep in stock because it is so expensive), the savings often far exceeds to cost of shipping.
You should call your representatives and demand a 100% sales tax, because it's probably going to cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to punish me for not giving the government a couple of hundred dollars that I earned.
As a private citizen (as opposed to a business) there's probably a very slim chance of non-payme
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because it's probably going to cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to punish me for not giving the government a couple of hundred dollars that I earned.
Sure, but that's the case with all non-violent crimes. Some guy steals something and you spend $250K to lock him up for five years, not to mention the cost of prosecuting him. That's just how it is.
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Some guy steals something and you spend $250K to lock him up for five years, not to mention the cost of prosecuting him. That's just how it is.
In a sane system, theft would carry a civil liability sufficient to cover all the costs of catching the thief and making the victim whole. If the victim wants to go further (proportional retribution) that is their right, but it's also their own free choice and consequently their responsibility to fund. In any case being locked up for five years is hardly a proportional response to theft.
When it'll hurt (Score:1)
New Hampshire (Score:3, Informative)
Yet another reason [freestateproject.org] to live in New Hampshire: No sales tax.
In praise of New Hampshire (Score:4, Informative)
Yet another reason [freestateproject.org] to live in New Hampshire: No sales tax.
In further praise of New Hampshire note that we also don't have an income tax and, unlike California, we're not bankrupt. Also, the unemployment rate [unemployme...ension.org] is pretty low - currently 5%.
(We have high property taxes, but one of the lowest overall tax burdens [modernsurvivalblog.com], so having high property taxes isn't as important as you might think.)
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Also very relevant to this is the direct democracy in much of the state at the local level, and one of the lowest constituent-to-representative ratios in the world in the state government. That makes it one of the most responsive governments you'll find anywhere, where you can in fact convince the powers that be to change policy if you're right.
Other interesting fact: New Hampshire has the longest-serving Secretary of State in the country, who took office in 1976 and has stayed there ever since. The reason?
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We have 400 State Representatives, which currently works out to 3,291 constituents per Rep. We also have, rather than a lieutenant governor, a five-member Executive Council, which holds a check on virtually all decisions that the Governor makes.
All towns in New Hampshire either follow the traditional "New England town meeting" style of direct democracy, or a two-stage system ("SB2 towns") where the town meeting just votes on what appears on the ballot, including the budget, and then the townspeople vote by
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It's amazing what can be accomplished by not having an administrative-heavy government.
For example, some are outraged that we just gave NH officials free tolls on NH turnpikes. The thing is, we have to reimburse them for travel expenses (and they're mostly volunteer positions anyway, making NH less crooked than other New England states) which is administratively heavy, so it's cheaper to just give them a free pass on in-state turnpikes. It keeps the overall costs down, gives legislators a little perk in add
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It's $200/term, which means $100/year---and I seem to remember a rep telling me it's actually about $93 after federal taxes.
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The "Massholes bringing socialism here" thing is largely a myth. Most people moving from Massachusetts are in fact economic/political refugees, just like some of the people in this thread. (I left the day Romneycare went into effect, 2007-07-01.) And most settle around the southeastern part of the state, between Manchester/Nashua and the seacoast.
There's an organization called the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance [nhliberty.org], of which I'm a board member; we rate [nhliberty.org] State Representatives each year on their respect for libert
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For those interested in the details:---
New Hampshire has no sales or income tax, but does have a 9% restaurant/hotel tax, an "income and dividends" tax for capital gains over $1,200/year, and two business taxes---one is a typical business profits tax like you'll find in all states, and the other is a sort of "reverse" income tax, in that the business owner pays it rather than the employee. It's minimal though, something like 1/4% of the money paid to the employees.
New Hampshire also has a lot of user fees a
collects, not charges (Score:2, Interesting)
Merchants collect sales taxes, the government charges the taxes.
And the tax is really on the buyer in most states; that way the tax isn't a cost of doing business.
Yay, corporations terraforming our legal system! (Score:2, Funny)
A few more decades like this, and you won't be able to tell this nation ever had flesh-and-blood inhabitants just from looking at our statutes and caselaw!
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This is Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon fights local sales tax because they don't like the notion that any municipality with 3 pigs and a mayor can impose their own laws on Amazon despite Amazon having no physical presence there. If you were running a website, would you want to care about every law that some nut job five states over dreams up?
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That's basically the problem in a nutshell.
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Great opportunity for a B2B tech startup! Mr. Merchant, we'll figure out the tax for you and take care of the paperwork in return for a surcharge of 0.5 percent.
They already exist. They're expensive, very expensive.
The problem isn't feeding the details into a spreadsheet and getting a value out, the problem is partially maintaining that spreadsheet (well, really a bit more complex than that) and partially that tax collection laws are very divergent in the details.
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costly legal and technical burden (Score:3)
Have any of you attempted to build a professional shopping cart and tried to get accurate sales tax working for states like California, Texas, and New York?
It's amazing how costly it can be because there's no easy way to map zip codes or any other easily looked up value to a tax rate. Zip codes can cross county lines and if a mall is built on a county line, there could be different sales tax rates within the same building. And yet, the states are no help in helping online stores to easily comply with the varying sales tax rates, even though they stand to make more money if people can more easily comply.
Even Paypal, Amazon Payments, Google, and other payment providers will not calculate sales tax for you, likely because it's so easy to get it wrong- The liability of miscalculating sales tax must be huge- Amazon has the money to fight the state tax offices but not a mom and pop online store.
There are several companies that exist solely to help shopping cart builders comply with the sales tax burdens of the different states, but the fees for using paid APIs can be high. One of these companies has map illustrating the problem [avalara.com].
Makes sense (Score:2)
(many states that tax Amazon don't tax other online retailers).
This seems quite unfair. Should definitely be fixed. I call BS on a state that taxes Amazon ONLY and leaves everyone else alone. That's plainly unfair, surprised they can get away with that.
Didn't think you could pass laws to tax specific business entities. Learn something new every day!
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All you need to know (Score:2)
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They didn't get that way by paying more tax than they had to.
Warren Buffett is Warren Buffett because of a ridiculously good track record of stock picks. Either he's very very good at it, or very very lucky.
He's also at the same point as his buddy Bill Gates: Sure, he could pay fewer taxes and save millions, but when you already have enough to make somewhere around $300 million a year easily without any kind of chicanery, what's the point? These guys have realized that there's such a thing as "enough", and they already have way more than that, so they're trying to bu
I guess we can agree to disagree (Score:2)
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Doesn't change the fact that sales tax is regressive. Once again the 1% fucks the everyman. When's it gonna be our time to violently ass rape Mr. Monopoly?
Well, it's not entirely regressive. A low income person will spend a higher portion of his income on food and housing than a higher income person -- things that are generally exempt from state tax. The higher income person will be eating out more, buying more "toys", buying an expensive car, etc and generally making more purchases that are not exempt from tax.
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A low income person will spend a higher portion of his income on food and housing than a higher income person -- things that are generally exempt from state tax. The higher income person will be eating out more, buying more "toys", buying an expensive car, etc and generally making more purchases that are not exempt from tax.
In the worst states the poor pay 7% of their income in sales/excise taxes vs 4.6% for middle incomes and 0.9% for the wealthiest. from ITEP:
States’ consumption tax structures are highly regressive with an average 7 percent rate for the poor, a 4.6 percent rate for middle incomes, and a 0.9 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers. Because food is one of the largest expenses for a low-income family, taxing food is a particularly regressive tax policy; five of the ten most regressive states tax food at the state or local level. Excise taxes on things like gasoline, cigarettes or beer take about 1.6 percent of the income of the poorest families, 0.8 percent from middle income families and 0.1 percent of income from the most well-off.
http://www.itep.org/pdf/whopayses.pdf [itep.org]
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And why is a regressive tax bad? People love to complain about regressive taxes, but the argument why they're bad always falls back to "because its bad!". I find that opponents of regressive taxes always prefer progressive taxes, as if that's somehow better. Why?
Because it puts an excessive burden on the poor, who are least able to afford it. The assumption is that the rich got rich from the work of the poor. Which is probably not so true today as it was when we had a more industrial economy.
Now the rich get rich in increasingly complex financial schemes to extract more and more money from the underprivileged. I don't think it's sustainable in the long term - the 1% has an enormous portion of the wealth in this country, and the class of poor is expanding as the mid
So the solution is... (Score:2)
Because it puts an excessive burden on the poor, who are least able to afford it.
So which is better: adjusting the tax rate, or subsidizing the poor?
Adjusting the tax rate is communism: it relies on the perfect wisdom and incorruptibility of the ruling class to set the right rates. It's subject to personal bias, extrapolation from incomplete knowledge, and outright malfeasance.
It's also an indirect solution, which leads many people (myself included) to suspect ulterior motives. If your purpose is to help the poor, then why adjust the tax rate? A better solution is to identify and subsid
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But if the option were to tear up the entire system and institute a flat tax with almost no deductions (except maybe one standard deduction per person) and then provide direct subsidies to the poor
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WHAT?
Let me get this out of the way in case you think I'm trolling you- I also would prefer a flat tax. I also believe we should help the poor through subsides as you mentioned. Now that's out of the way...
WHAT? Adjusting taxes is communism? And you throw that out there like you want to point out communism is bad. You then follow that up saying we should provide Food Stamps & Section 8 housing. ----- THAT is communism! (socialism actually but most equate the
Heh. (Score:2)
I chose the term "communism" on purpose because that's how the MSM sways groupthink - by linking things to hated concepts so that people will reject an idea out of habit without thinking. I'm experimenting with message delivery. Like you say, people equate communism with socialism, and I was trying for a knee-jerk reaction. (Your post wasn't one, BTW.)
I'm actually *for* helping the poor, and to a greater extent than we currently do. More than mainstream democrats, I think. I'm a big fan of doing it more ef
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I like the cut o yer jib matey! It's political piracy!
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Sorry, how is having the ruling class define poverty any better than having them set tax rates? For that matter, since you mention food coupons and rent assistance, you're having the ruling class perform budgeting for the poor by forcibly allocating funds, while the rest of us get to decide
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The modern notion of a middle class is a complete aberration, and a bit of a misnomer. The middle class has only really existed since the mid 1900s, and previously no society has ever had one. The American and European middle class only came into existence because of our society's ability to extract wealth from other countries.
The American middle class is in fact part of the global 1%. As America's ability to control foreign economies and resources decreases, the lower echelons of the global 1% who live in
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One thing states have been doing is saying if someone in for example North Dakota posts a link to a product on their blog, that constitutes nexus in North Dakota for Amazo
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Suppose I live in a state with a low sales tax and travel to one with a higher rate. I pay with a credit card, just as I would if I were at home making a payment to an online reseller. Do I get charged my home-state tax rate? NO.
It depends on the states. If you are a resident of Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, American Samoa, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, or the Yukon Territory and you are visiting Washington, you are not charged sales tax on tangible personal property, digital goods, and digital codes purchased in Washington if they are for use outside Washington. You show the merchant picture ID that shows your address, and they ring up the sale without sales tax.
Re:Just Hateful (Score:5, Insightful)
Ill gotten gains?
Pal, I don't like paying taxes any more than the next guy. But, county, city, and state governments do require money to operate. Your county almost certainly has roads to maintain. Someone has to pay for it. Your schools cost money. Everything costs. So, how are you going to pay for it?
Each state has different formulas for funding things at the local level. Maybe your state doesn't use any sales tax for education, but the next state over uses most of sales tax for education. So, I can't know where YOUR sales taxes went 30 years ago, or today.
But, the fact is, 30 years ago, almost everything sold at retail WAS TAXED. The county and the state both had a sales tax, and they got their cut on just about everything. With today's internet, both are simply cut out of about half (or more) of their revenues.
Do I WANT to pay my county a few cents every time I make an online purchase? Not really. But, I do need my roads. I like having the parks cleaned up and maintained. And, the kids need stuff at school. Horatio has been wanting to do some much-needed work at the Horatio High School's football field. The money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
What I do NOT LIKE, is the fact that local and state governments have become more reliant on federal funds for everything, from school funds, to highway funds, to local infrastructure improvements. Local governments should be independent of Washington's money. Sales tax was a large part of that financial independence.
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The taxes on the gas are supposed to pay for the roads. The property taxes are supposed to pay for the schools and town govt. A sales is acceptable because someone is doing business within the state. A sales tax on an out of state purchase is the state trying to punish you for going somewhere else to save a few bucks because they don't
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You still don't seem to connect all the dots. Large retail corporations have cut small retailers out, and at the same time, cut out local governments. Once upon a time, within living memory, the vast majority of people bought 99% of their goods locally. To get cheaper goods, or to benefit from lower tax rates, you had to actually drive across state lines. Yes - we did that. A lot of things in my home state were taxed, but 20 miles across the state line, some of those things were tax free, or taxed at a
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Maybe now cities will start switching from sales taxes to property taxes. Property taxes "encourage cities to make land-use decisions that bolster property values...Sales tax just incentivizes you to put up big-box stores. [utsandiego.com]"
I'd rather see my house value go up than see more Wal-Marts. Wouldn't you?
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I agree. The company I work for is benefitting from an arrangement with the city and county government. I don't like it at all. Cheating rat bastards, take the money, and laugh all the way to the bank. But - it's not like I have a voice in the matter. The mayor, the county judges, and my bosses all gain something - we, the average taxpayers get nothing.
Pressure? You may have guessed that I am an outspoken person. I put all the pressure that I can on everyone involved. But, one loudmouthed old man do
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Moar Roads?
Heaven forbid they build more and better roads for the delivery truck to travel on. Or do you think stuff you order just materalizes on your front porch?
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I never bought anything from Amazon, simply because they want to charge me the additional 27% VAT of my own country, while on the Internet they should charge none and I'd pay it at the customs when it arrives. If I paid them, would they return the tax money to our government later? I don't think so.
Yes, they would turn the tax money over to your government.
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Got that backwards pal. There should be no INCOME tax anywhere and federal sales tax everywhere, on everything. Income taxes are so grossly unfair.