they support it to screw their competition and the consumer
Well, I guess you could say that, as well as the opposite. I don’t like it either, but an objective analysis would question why a retailer who invests in your community by creating a physical presence (brick and mortar), hiring employees, maintaining an inventory of demo merchandise, etc is penalized vs. an online retailer that doesn’t do any of these things. Amazon is in the position now of selectively collecting and paying sales taxes, and I’m thinking their motivation here is to “flatten” the tax by making it apply to everyone everywhere.
Of course the other alternative would be to eliminate sales taxes everywhere, but that’s not going to happen.
Generally I hate whining about “It’s not fair!” - but having talke to a number of small business owners, in this case it’s true. Amazon knows it will still get it’s share, especially since charging taxes across the board will lower their costs.
Kiss Amazon good bye! They’ll be Chapter 11 by next year.
I don’t think that is it at all. Jeff Bezos would prefer that there was no such law, but they looked at the situation and decided that it was inevitable. They support this law because it at least makes the process of calculating the taxes simple and straightforward.
Amazon has never wanted to play the municipality game. In many states, sales tax can vary by county, or even city, and just keeping up with the constantly changing sales tax code is a full time job for many sites that do collect and remit sales taxes. They have said in the past that they're willing to collect and remit sales taxes, but only at the state level, and not willing to handle multiple tax zones.
The second thing they wanted was a limited immunity from local bans on products - some municipality bans adult novelty products, for example, and then someone orders the banned product from various online retailers, then city attorneys go after the violators of the ban with various fines and penalties. I don't know if the bill in question actually has this in it, but if Amazon's pushing for it, it likely does.
The question really becomes - is there a constitutional manner for the federal government to mandate collection and remission of sales taxes where a business has no physical location? I don't think so - voluntary compliance is one thing, but mandated compliance I don't think is actually enforceable. But if it has the dangling carrot of immunity from unknowing violation of local laws, then there's something that a lot of companies would be willing to take in exchange for collecting sales taxes.