Huh? I'm not sure what you're saying here.
The fact is I still send a check to the government and the customer is where the money came from in BOTH cases.
The difference is in that you're collecting the customer's portion of HIS tax due to government. A tax he is VOLUNTARILY paying because he is making a purchase. You're not paying a damn thing. It ain't your money; it isn't coming out of your pocket, you're just routing it to where it needs to go. In computer parlance, it's a distributed processing sort of system. And as a retailer, you're already part of it, only just at the state level. A few programming changes and it's also on the federal level.
You, likewise, are not paying any taxes on your income until you purchase some new service or goods.
So this brings me back to what I said in Post 343, which you somehow have failed to address. Which is: If this whole system is a wash revenue wise; then why are you in favor of keeing the current Rube Goldberg (nice term for - Cluster F#@k) of a system we have now????
The difference is in that you're collecting the customer's portion of HIS tax due to government. A tax he is VOLUNTARILY paying because he is making a purchase. You're not paying a damn thing. It ain't your money; it isn't coming out of your pocket, you're just routing it to where it needs to go. In computer parlance, it's a distributed processing sort of system. And as a retailer, you're already part of it, only just at the state level. A few programming changes and it's also on the federal level.
That is one of the clearest statements of the bottomline of how a retail sales tax operates I have seen.
My hat is off to you.
Your logic is right on ... great point to the SQL who started this thread.
As you've seen on the thread, he has a vested interest in the Status Quo which is why he defends it so much. Same is true for most of the SQL fellows.