Senate To Vote On Internet Sales Tax (For Real This Time) 326
New submitter JoeyRox writes "On 3/22 the Senate approved a non-binding proposal to allow states to tax online sales to residents outside their state. That vote was a trial balloon to gauge the support for the Marketplace Fairness Act. This week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed a cloture to allow the law to be voted on for real this time. The vote may occur as soon as tomorrow. eBay is attempting to rally Americans against the bill via a massive email campaign."
Re:This is a Constitutional tax (Score:1, Interesting)
The Federal tax must be uniform, the USA Constitution does not give authority to the Congress to prevent individual States, counties, municipalities from collecting their own taxes.
The question is whether this law going to force Amazon (and the rest) to collect taxes for localities where Amazon has no physical presence? That would be unconstitutional, federal government cannot force a retailer to collect local taxes.
Federally Constitutional excise tax is not a local sales tax. Also there is an interesting question about legality of forcing the seller to collect the tax, even if it is Constitutional. Of-course the government has no problem turning bankers and financial types into unpaid FBI and IRS agents, so forcing an online store to be one is not out of their character, they don't have a problem with it.
Re:This is a Constitutional tax (Score:1, Interesting)
You are talking about things that you didn't in fact think about. You should go read the 16th, then go read the link to my comment where I explain that what is in the amendment is not in fact authorisation to collect an income tax. It is an allowance to tax 'income' (without defining what that is) without apportionment.
It was left up to the courts to define what income was, and I talk about the court cases and SCOTUS decisions in my comment [slashdot.org], which show that SCOTUS explained that an unapportioned tax cannot be direct, so it must be an indirect tax. Eventually the court explained that in order to have an 'indirect income' is by dis-associating a person from his income, and that was possible to do through a corporate balance sheet, so the 'income tax' in fact was explained to be a corporate profit tax.
There is no individual profit, individually you have incomes, not profits, otherwise you have to be able to subtract your own costs (depreciation of your body is part of it) from your revenues.
Again, you can read the comment, obviously you commented without doing it, otherwise you would at the minimum come back with something meaningful to say rather than that, whatever that was.