Posted on 08/16/2017 4:03:29 AM PDT by SMGFan
Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!
I doubt it would stick but I would love to see the owner of the Washington compost hey reamed by anti-trust violations
This country is about to explode. I’ve never said that before on here. Never.
Now I am.
Sadly i agree
My son told me he saw that Amazon is going to start collecting sales tax on all transactions.
If so, that may put a dent into their business.
However, it does not seem that Amazon or any online retailer operates independently. I recently ordered an item from Amazon, and it was shipped from Sam’s Club. I’ve never bought anything from Sam’s Club (though I do shop at WalMart).
If local retailers don’t have what I want, which is more often than not the case, that’s not bloody Amazon’s fault, Mr. President.
Last I knew POTUS supports the minimum wage.
FWIW, Mr. President, I think minimum wage increases have done more to harm bricks and mortar retail than Amazon.
I don’t know. Things seem pretty normal to me. More than 99% of Americans are just going about their daily business in the usual way. I think the 24/7 Internet driven news cycle distorts the picture. Before all this media, a small gathering of nutjobs in Virginia would have gotten nothing more than a little local media attention. But the frenzied media descended on the town like locusts, determined to turn it into a major national event.
A very tiny subset of Americans have the idle time to get out in the streets and protest. Most of us are busy working, paying our bills, tending to our families and it being August, squeezing in a little vacation.
Yesterday during work, I took a walk by Trump Tower. You had about a half dozen typical hippies chanting slogans, and holding signs. There were about a hundred press photographers out on the sidewalk along 5th Avenue. But outside that one block, people were ambling around shopping, licking ice cream cones, eating pizza and checking out the area pubs. They couldn’t care less about the small band of scraggly people shouting their scripted anti-Trump screeds. They were just part of the touristy scene. Quaint. Let’s take a photo of the cute protesters and text it to the kids. Then let’s find a nice cafe for some coffee and bagels.
I think the 1960s had far more civil unrest than we are seeing today.
If you’d care to engage in a civil conversation, feel free to get back to me.
Implicit in the reasoning that products sold on the Internet should remain tax free is that taxes damage growth. If they damage growth for the Internet then they must also damage growth for brick and mortar stores. In the early ‘90’s I worked for Elcotel, a private pay telephone provider. An individual could buy a few pay phones and convince, say convenience stores, to put them outside. The profits were shared. Pre-Obamaphone, these were highly profitable as many poor people couldn’t afford land lines. The most valuable asset the company had was a software package that kept track of all the various tax rates in all the hundreds of thousands of tiny tax districts. The cost of tracking all of this was spectacular and the biggest drag on the business model. It was a ridiculous paperwork and accounting nightmare. The cost of tracking two cents and how it was distributed was higher than the tax itself. This is the situation that would be faced by Amazon.
The solution isn’t to tax Amazon but to relieve all products of taxes. Cigarette taxes, which affect the poor much more than the wealthy as by-an-large they are the ones who still smoke, have caused huge distortions in the economy and the law. Recall Eric Garner was allegedly choked to death by Statin Island police for selling “loosies” or, individual cigarettes, on which he had paid the package tax but not the next tax for his sale of one cigarette.
In my own neighborhood, north Florida, there is a very large organization of tax collectors who pull over and search trucks for tax violations. Somebody with a pickup truck might go to Georgia and buy a dresser and bring it home across the border without paying Florida’s tax. Every time I see these guys, and they are numerous, I wonder if anybody has taken the time to calculate the cost/benefit ratio of their lifetime employment/retirement/medical benefits cost vs how much they collect in tax. The same could be said of other tax agencies and “code” enforcement which are increasingly the regular police. What is the cost to public safety that police are rewarded more for code enforcement than for law enforcement?
We have 14 days to go in August.
Charlottesville was prelude
Investigate that supposed US postal subsidy. Who contracted this, when, and why?
Supposedly over a buck something per package
INVESTIGATE
I pay Tennessee sales tax on Amazon purchases
Foolish post
IIRC, Amazon collects and pays out from every state that has a state tax on retail purchases that qualify.
Exempt all local stores from taxation on both ends of all transactions and there will be a fighting chance to price compete. It’s all about people voting with their wallets.
Not sure what Trump is driving at here but slapping taxes on Amazon and other online retailers aren’t going to do much for traditional brick and mortar retail stores. The genie is out of the bottle. Online shopping is much more convenient and people aren’t coming back to the malls and local shops.
Amazon to start collecting state sales taxes everywhere
Right church, wrong pew, Mr. President.
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