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Forcing an entity over which a state has no legal jurisdiction to collect a tax and submit it to that state is a very dangerous proposition and a horrible precedent, a precedent that establishes intrastate jurisdiction for purposes of taxation.

The alternative is to abandon the sales tax, since as it is the sales tax is becoming an unfairly applied tax, hitting people who shop at local stores that employ people in the state, while those who shop online are getting help cheating on their taxes.

To me, the far greater danger is the disincentive for stores to operate within communities, by providing a false advantage to pulling up stakes and becoming a non-physical entity. It's already harder for local stores to operate against the economies of scale of a major mail-order shop (the shipping costs are about the only "disincentive" of mail-order, and as more people ship the per-unit costs are dropping; the brick-and-mortar stores do have some shipping costs to stock their shelves, and have local storage and operating costs).

Imagine if there were no more local stores, and everything was purchased from one of two or three "amazon" type stores. There'd be employment for shipping companies, but no place for people to find jobs in their own communities. Guess what -- I'm a "conservative" in every sense of the word, and part of that means I don't like the idea of radical change all at once; I'm sure given time we would cope with the shift, but not in the short term.

I happen to like sales tax, because it is a tax that you control to some degree by deciding whether to buy things, and it is a fair tax, in that I don't get taxed more than the hippie who lives off government welfare.

Let me put it another way -- Logically, how would you "justify" a system where Barnes and Noble online is required to collect sales tax for virtually every state in the union, while Amazon, selling exactly the same product to exactly the same people, does not? I understand the REASON -- but how is that logical, when you consider that B&N could get the same treatment as Amazon, if they simply shut down all their stores and fired most of their employees.

It just doesn't make sense to me to operate a tax code that encourages bad behavior. I think the tax code shouldn't encourage ANY behavior; it should be neutral. Right now, Amazon specifically avoids certain practices that might actually be better for it's business, simply to avoid tripping over the "nexus" line and having to collect sales taxes. I want a sales tax that applies equally to everybody in the state who buys the same item, regardless of where they buy it.