The GOP had better not become tax collectors for lib governors like Martin O Malley and Jerry Brown by supporting this crap.
I see McCain and many others voted to stab us in the back with this in Senate.
They just want the whole pie. They don't care if it's smaller, just so long as they are the only ones who get to eat it.
I remember seeing a clause in the constitution stating all tax bills originate in the house.
There are more than 9,500 regional and local tax jurisdictions in our country; it will be an outrageous burden on small businesses to try to comply with all of these sales tax laws.A well-written law would require that states meet a common standard for a level of simplicity in order to participate in this new program. There is such a movement afoot, and Nevada for example joined that coalition and changed their sales tax to comply a few years ago.
But in the end, this is a red herring. A computer program will take any address in the country, and spit out the correct tax. Every business in a sales tax state has the software doing just this for their state. All you need to do is tie them all together.
Moreso, WalMart and other major brick-and-mortar companies already do this on-line, so they already have the program that provides the correct results.
This is like claiming that the government can't possible give you a tax refund, because there are 100 million different tax filings and each one is unique. It is all computers now, and lookup tables are trivial, you could build a million-item database or a billion-item database, makes no difference. Your IPAD could run the software (I've seen this done on portable devices at trade shows).
The issue isn't how hard it would be, the issue is whether the software will be cost-prohibitive. I would argue not once the bill is law, because of economy of scale. But if it is, the law could be written to require each state to provide a free program that meets interface standards and provides the answer needed; you would then tie the 50 programs together with a master program you'd buy.
The only reason huge corporations like Wal-Mart are proponents of this bill is to stifle and crush competition.Walmart is a proponent because they already do this job, since they have real stores in virtually every state, so they see this as making their competitors follow the same rules.
Amazon is now supporting this because they are spending a lot of money in lawsuits, and have decided that having a bill which provides some protection and forces all companies to do this would be cheaper for them than the legal bills -- it has reached the point where the advantage they get as a business helping people cheat on their state taxes isn't worth the cost.
No doubt, some companies are doing this to crush the competition; but the laws being proposed don't cover small business anyway, depending on how they define small business.
E-commerce is driven by product selection, price, and convenience – otherwise known as old-fashioned competition. It is not driven by the avoidance of local sales taxes.If that was true, Amazon wouldn't have constructed their entire business model on avoiding qualifying for sales tax -- since they have business partners for which they collect sales tax in every state, they weren't worried about the program, or the cost of reimbursing states. It was all about the competitive advantage of telling people "no sales tax". The argument is laughable -- I just went to several sites last night online, every one of which prominently told me on the front page "And No Sales Tax Collected".
Amazon has gone so far as to cancel productive affiliate programs JUST to avoid collecting sales taxes that they were already set up to collect and remit.
If you shop online, you realize that shipping charges are always added to your purchase. These shipping charges are always higher than what sales tax would be.That is hardly the case. Every item you buy from anywhere is shipped from where it is built. Most big chains have warehouses for intermediate storage, and then ship to their stores. FedEx and UPS are highly efficient now, and there is only a marginal extra cost to drive the truck around to every house, instead of stopping at every physical store. You can bet Amazon is not paying the same cost for shipping as you are.
I'd also argue that you can find free shipping at many online stores, but I realize that they have simply absorbed those costs, and adjusted their prices. But so have brick-and-mortar shops, which also have to pay someone to check you out, and someone to stock the shelves and clean them up at night -- the cost of putting an item on the shelf and then selling it is about the same as the cost of shipping an item to your home from a warehouse.
As a matter of principle, Republicans should be against this tax increase.There is no tax increase. Every state that has a sales tax already has a "use tax", payable by the purchasers whenever sales tax is not collected, or insufficient sales tax is collected. If people aren't paying the taxes now, it is because they are cheating on their taxes. Republicans should oppose tax cheating, but a lot of conservatives seem to actually applaud those who cheat on their taxes, since government takes too much in tax.
The conservative position is that everybody should be equally afflicted by the tax burden, and then the taxes should be reduced for everybody. We shouldn't support "tax cut by fraud", because that benefits the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding.
A better argument would be that republicans should oppose this law because they think it is the inappropriate way for the problem of tax cheats to be handled. However, to make that argument, you really need to provide another solution that works better. Because it is un-conservative to have two people who live next door to another pay different tax burdens simply because of where they choose to buy something. As conservatives, we should want taxes to be a little as possible, as broadly-based as possible, and as evenly applied as possible. We shouldn't be standing up for tax cheats.
This bill is about politicians in cash-strapped states (e.g. California) looking for new sources of income to fund their already irresponsible spending.It is about state politicians in EVERY state (Virginia is hardly cash-strapped, and they are pushing this legislation) which has a sales tax and has seen the sales tax revenue dropping every year, wanting a method by which they can get their residents to obey the tax laws and pay their required sales taxes.
Please do not be a party to that.I support making every person in a state pay the same sales tax on the same item purchased at the same price, regardless of how they purchased the item. If I buy Mark Levin's book from Barnes and Noble online, and my neighbor buys the book from Amazon.com for the same price, we should both pay the same sales tax.
I don't know if I support the specific bill coming out of the senate. You can do this right, and you can do this wrong. But I support fixing the problem, and I reject the argument that there is no problem.
The state should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. The tax code should be neutral, so that each business, big and small, compete on the same field, with the same costs. If shipping goods makes things more expensive, we shouldn't subsidize shipping by waiving sales tax. If you can't compete because of shipping costs, then you should fail.