Senator Wants to Tax Internet Shopping 705
tripleevenfall writes "A Democratic senator is preparing to introduce legislation that aims to end the golden era of tax-free Internet shopping. The proposal — expected to be made public soon after Tax Day — would rewrite the ground rules for Internet and mail order sales by eliminating the ability of Americans to shop at Web sites like Amazon.com and Overstock.com without paying state sales taxes."
Re:Level playing field (Score:3, Informative)
Because Best Buy charges $40 for a cable that's $4.99 with free shipping at new egg. Brick and mortar stores have resorted to extorting consumers on certain smaller items for which they can count on people not wanting to wait for a delivery.
Plus, large scale online outfits are probably more "green" that brick and mortar stores anyway. They only operate some offices and warehouses and any delivery fuel usage is mostly offset by deliveries to a brick and mortar store plus the consumer driving to and from the store.
Re:Surprised? (Score:1, Informative)
Spend more implies that they actually spent more money. The past two years would beg to differ with you, quite dramatically.
Bipartisan (Score:5, Informative)
A possible co-sponsor is Sen. Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican who backed a similar proposal before and did not respond to a request for comment.
then:
Update 10:30 a.m. PT: I've heard back from Sen. Mike Enzi's office. It sent me e-mail this morning saying: "Senator Enzi plans to co-sponsor the Main Street Fairness bill with Senator Durbin. As far as a timeline or drafts, you'll have to check with Senator Durbin's office."
So it's bipartisan.
Don't even think it's only Democrats that raise taxes, or you will be school in tax history.
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, the supply side fairy tale.
http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html [factcheck.org]
Re:Surprised? (Score:3, Informative)
http://blog.mises.org/16107/bushs-huge-budget-numbers-blamed-on-obama/ [mises.org]
Re:It needs to be a simple tax. (Score:5, Informative)
There is, but it involves geocoding every single address. And then updating it every time any one of the 60,000 tax districts change their boundaries or rates.
Here is the problem, you can have two houses on opposite sides of the street be in two different tax districts. So a simple 'if zip == xxxxx, then tax = Y' type of lookup table will not work.
You then have the issue of the corporation needing to potentially apply for a sales tax license in jurisdiction before they can collect the tax.
Then you have the issue of having to possibly send the check to 3 or 4 different groups on different schedules for each customer in a different.
And finally there is the question of what gets taxed. In some states, some items are not taxed (usually basic food). So if I order a 10lb tub of powdered gatorade from amazon.com it may get taxed in one state but not another, both of which have a sales tax.
To call it a mess is an understatement. This is the main reason why the courts tossed out the states requirement to collect the tax: the burden was simply too much. If memory serves me correctly, that same court decision left the door open to enact a simplified sales tax scheme (if shipping to NY, then charge X% and send it to Y address and be done with it).
Re:Surprised? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, and Obama's first year alone out spent all 8 years of Bush. Facts - they're a beautiful thing.
I despise the Republicans almost as much as the Democrats - but this childish "The Messiah is perfect!" crap that completely defies all facts is really getting old.
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Angry at Amazon (Score:4, Informative)
See Amendment 16 regarding the legality of Income Taxes.
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
Federal revenue normally increases every year. In fact, revenues have declined in only five years since 1962. The 35 percent growth between 2003 and 2006 is significant – the last major growth in revenue was between 1997 and 2000, when the economy was booming and federal receipts rose 28.2 percent. But the recent three-year period also comes after three years of decreases, a drop Viard attributes to the 2001 tax cuts and the start of a recession that same year.
The economy does not turn quickly. A huge recession started after the dot com bubble popped, then the tax cuts came in 2001. It takes time for that kind of change to see an economic impact. In the short term there will be none, in fact in the short term you will simply see a reduction in revenue. in the mid term, a year or two later you sill see the increase.
Three years after the tax cuts, the tax revenue returned to the 40 year average of 18.4% of GDP, with the lower rates So, no, lowering taxes will not immediately raise revenue, but it will increase GDP and help lower unemployment, which is what you need in a recession. The fact that they lowered the rates but are still collecting the same percentage of an increased GDP tells me that lowering taxes did in fact increase revenue, because historically the feds collect about 18% of GDP as taxes.
Summary: They lowered the tax rate, GDP grew and they still got their 18%. Sounds good to me.
Re:Level playing field (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, you know poor people spend a greater proportion of their income than rich people? That makes sales tax effectively regressive. If you want the rich to pay more (and I certainly do), tax income, property, and capital gains, not sales.
Re:Surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Angry at Amazon (Score:4, Informative)
> But stores have had to deal with this before the Internet anyway.
Yeah. For a SINGLE jurisdiction: the one they happen to be sitting in.
> You had mail order catalogs and you had to pay sales tax when you used them.
Ummm. No. Were you born yesterday? I mean really.
The "mail order tax scofflaw" problem has existed for a very long time. In
some respects, Amazon is nothing more than an extension of the mail order
operations from the 1880s. The catalogs are just snazzier.
Re:Income Tax vs Sales Tax (Score:3, Informative)
Bzzt. Economics fail.
But don't worry, you're in good company - most liberals don't understand this basic concept.
Imagine an economy in which there are 10 workers making a combined total of only 1 widget a year. At the end of the year, they all get paid an arbitrary amount of money (it doesn't matter how much), but only one of them walks away with the widget. All the rest do without.
Now imagine an economy in which the 10 workers each make 10 widgets a year, a total of 100. At the end of the year, they all get paid (again, the numbers printed on the money don't matter), and they will all end up with an average of 10 widgets each.
They all just got 100 times richer. How did that happen?
The answer: because their real productivity increased. In terms of money, they might all have been making $10/year in the first year, and $1/year in the second, but in real, actual measures of wealth, they all became 100 times wealthier. (Again, the numbers printed on the money don't matter.)
Inflation is what happens when you have extra money chasing the same amount of goods and services around. It does *not* apply when you have increased goods and services. If you could double the output of all factories on the earth, our real per capita wealth would double.
Socialists and liberals have a mental block when it comes to this very simple principle - productivity is *not* a zero-sum game.