Posted by savedbygrace in a related thread.
Art I Sec 9:
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
Art I Sec 10:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws; and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
What about use taxes? Those are apparently constitutional, because many states get away with them. With a use tax, I’m required to pay the use tax (equal to sales tax) when I buy something tax-free online.
“It is unfair for retailers who have a bricks-and-mortar presence in a state to be at an economic disadvantage as they try to compete with online retailers”
It is unfair to require online retailers to share in the burden of taxes that go to police and fire services for which they have no presence.
Lawrence [Massachusetts] Mayor's Office Gets $10K Face Lift
The city of Lawrence is in trouble. It's in the process of getting a $35 million loan, with state approval, just to stay afloat.While that process is ongoing, the Valley Patriot – a monthly paper – is reporting the mayor is spending $10,000 to spruce up his office.
[Massachusetts] Governor Deval Patrick hires chief of staff for his wife, gives her office
The state has hired a $72,000-a-year chief of staff whose sole job will be to schedule Diane Patrick's public appearances and media availabilities, The Sentinel & Enterprise has learned.Diane Patrick also gets a slice of office space in the governor's third-floor suite.
But what is the purpose behind the levy of sales taxes by the state- to provide services that are required by the presence of commercial infrastructure and employees in a state.
A retailer with no physical presence in the state requires no services from the state, so what would be the rational for imposing taxes ? Other than just straight-out, insatiable, government greed , I mean ?
We are working on the same bill in Virginia, and Amazon has threatened the same action.
Eventually, they’ll be out of all 50 states I guess, and we can stop worrying about them.
There is no rational reason why a person buying a book online from Amazon should get the book tax-free, while the person buying the same book online from Borders books has to pay the sales tax.
Amazon could easily collect sales tax for all 50 states. Borders does it. Barnes and Noble does it. Every national chain that has real stores in states does it. This is the 21st century, computers can easily assign the correct values.
Most states require their citizens to pay sales tax when companies fail to collect it. Virginia is one of those states. Because Amazon doesn’t have to collect the sales tax, I have to keep all my Amazon sales slips, add them up, and if they come to more than $100, I have to fill out a tax form and pay the sales tax myself on my yearly tax bill.
Or I could be a tax cheat, and not pay. In 2008, only 285 people in Virginia actually paid their sales taxes on out-of-state purchases, mostly people who bought furniture from North Carolina, where Virginia has a deal the the furniture companies send the information to the state.
This isn’t about whether sales should be taxed or not. That is a valid state question, and each state should decide if it’s citizens should pay sales tax or not.
But in order to have out-of-state companies selling things to people in-state collect the sales tax, Congress has to pass a bill allowing it, or else only those companies who do business in the state have to collect it.
Amazon has outlets in multiple states, people living in those states who sell Amazon products through their own web sites, and who get a cut of the money, just like a brick-and-mortar shop. But those affiliates don’t collect money, Amazon does, and Amazon doesn’t do the sales tax because they insist they don’t have a presense, even in states where their warehouses are located (warehouses which not owned by Amazon, but that Amazon contracts to exclusively to deliver their products, again to avoid sales tax).
Many online retailers already do this successfully. Target.com, Walmart.com, Borders.com, BarnesAndNoble.com, REI.com, SportsAuthority.com, Sears.com -- any online company that started as a brick-and-mortar company is collecting state sales tax for every state they have a single store in, even for online sales. As I said, it's the 21st century, computers are everywhere, and the idea that it is "too hard" to take the mailing address of an order and use it to search a database for the correct tax rate is stupid. What could be done though is to require states who want to collect the tax to set up an online database of tax rates that meet a common network interface (so a computer program can go to the state through a standard call with an address and get the tax rate), and a common state collection drop for the sales tax, with the state being responsible for distributing the tax collected to localities as needed. The idea that Amazon.com would find it impossible to figure out the correct tax rate is absurd. They HAVE the ability to collect sales tax, because they do so for at least one state. The only reason they fight this is because not charging sales tax gives them an unfair competitive edge over the companies that have to collect the sales tax.