Posted on 04/26/2013 10:11:02 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Internet sales tax bill to hit roadblock in House By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER | Associated Press – 42 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — A bill to require Internet shoppers to pay sales taxes for online purchases may be cruising through the Senate but it will soon hit a roadblock in the House.
"There's a lot of political difficulty getting through the fog of it looking like a tax increase," said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., one of the main sponsors of the bill in the House.
The bill would empower states to reach outside their borders and compel online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. Under the bill, the sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.
Under current law, states can only require stores to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state. As a result, many online sales are essentially tax-free, giving Internet retailers an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.
Womack says the bill is not a tax increase. Instead, he says, it simply gives states a mechanism to enforce current taxes.
In many states, shoppers are required to pay unpaid sales taxes when they file state tax returns. But governors complain that few people comply.
The Senate voted 63-30 Thursday to end debate on the bill, though senators delayed a final vote on passage until May 6, when they return from a weeklong vacation. Opponents hope senators hear from angry constituents over the next week, but they acknowledged they have a steep hill to climb to defeat the bill in the Senate.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Yes, pass higher taxes in an endless recession which has brought the economy to near-ruin.
Makes a Marxist, Obama kinda sense.
Which is to say no sense at all.
Kill it. How about Fedzilla learn how to do more with less?!
No more new taxes to make things “fair.”
So... Any guesses on when “Special” taxes like they apply to Motel room rentals will show up? I’m envisioning something like the L.A. Tax, (A hypothetical tax), of an additional 2% being added on when a resident of Greater Los Angeles makes an internet based purchase.
One hopes.
The House ought to find a way to give businesses subject to sales tax a break, rather than hurting businesses that aren’t.
SnakeDoc
We can only hope that those who truly represent Americans will act decisively and kill this piece of garbage.
If states truly want to help the brick and mortar local businesses then eliminate all sales taxes. And while they’re at it force municipalities to eliminate the pocket-picking tax on hotel rooms!
They need to figure out how to wisely spend today's tax bases, and not look for other revenue streams that would be mostly squandered.
This is actually the greedy grasping STATE GOVERNMENTS who are behind this one.
What did I ever do to you? What a horrible sentiment....
;-)
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and sh!ts like a duck. What is it?
would be mostly COMPLETELY squandered. Fixed it.
Rather the citizens retained $23 billion because they were able to avoid the greedy grasping state governments' further plundering of their wallets.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they would wisely spend about .0000000000001% of it.
This is an outright lie. Internet shoppers have to pay SHIPPING which leaves the scosts comparable. What the locals want to do is is go from competitive to having a price advantage enforced by the government. It is the wet dream of most merchants to force people to buy form them and leave the competition stuff in the dust of history.
Case in point - "Saw-Stop" is a mechanism that is added to a table saw that yanks the blade down into the body of the saw if it contacts flesh (under some circumstances.) They have been lobbying massively to get this added mandatorily to all table saws. If I was ever considering getting a saw stop saw I would never do so now. The other problem is that all of the demonstrations I've seen (with a hot dog) show the hot dog in contact with the saw table, but if your finger is going to hit the blade, then you're more likely to have it on top of a piece of wood or plastic that you're cutting and it probably won't work anyway because the impedence of the circuit that triggers the blade drop probably won't reach the threshold.
Only by mistake.
eliminate the pocket-picking tax on hotel rooms!”
Last summer on the warmest day in our history our a/c went out so we decided to stay in a hotel until the unit could be replaced. The taxes on our bill alone for one night were more than the cost of the room. Just one of the reasons we have had to restrict our family’s travel plans. Car rental is just as bad.
It’s going to end up killing the travel industry.
Many local areas jack the taxes on hotels and rental cars so they don’t make locals mad.
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