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States To Try Taxation Of The Net Again
kimbermatic writes "From the Denver Post comes this article that the states are ready to try and tax the internet sales once more. The poor economy is sending the 'hounds' sniffing for more money. An interesting, and alarming read if your interested in protecting online merchants from this taxation plan." 'though it's not really online sales that are the big ones people want -- it's catalog mail order sales, which are still much bigger then online sales.
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes. Sure, shopping online a huge convenience, but people today would still choose to drive to their local retailer and actually touch and try out a product before making a purchase, and forcing taxes on e-tailing would take away any incentive for consumers to use the services of the fledging new industry.
With huge competition with prices and selection from traditional real-life retailiers such as Walmart and Best Buy, e-tailers are already having enough trouble trying to grow their new industry. Slapping taxes and removing incentives for consumers to use online services would only impair progress. We're already seeing the effects of fees on online services and its related decrease in usage (MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail), taxes would further the disincentive campaign that seems to be propagating through the online world.------
Amadaeus
The last bastion of Mathie-ism
My word, when will these overbearing government goofballs learn that having LOW taxes while surrounded by HIGH tax areas drives business AND revenues up for the low tax area?
Also, don't think that if there is no visible sales tax that you are buying anything tax free. The politicians conveniently forget all of the inventory, property, business income and other tax streams that they are already getting BEFORE they jack up/create a sales tax.
A perfect example of that was Washington, DC. They exempted "not for profit" organizations and had the highest sales tax in the area. This only resulted in the few businesses that were paying taxes to loose business to Maryland and Virginia.
Tennessee is now on their way to driving every bit of retail business near it's borders into the surrounding States with their 9.5% (or is it 10%?) sales tax. That is on top of their invintory taxes, "licensing" taxes, etc.
Solution? A small group of States make it inviting for internet business to locate their warehousing, data centers, etc. there and reap the benefits of elevated employment and higher volume of money due to a lower % of taxation.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The governments shouldn't need to create any new laws to tax internet sales, because they should already do so.
Performing an age old activity like sending packages through the mail in exchange for money transmitted by credit card should be equally taxable regardless of whether the customer places her order via phone, email, paper mail, http, fax, or the trusty old carrier pigeon.
We've seen it again and again- government regulators/lawmakers/busybodies get tricked into thinking that activities are somehow inherently different when computers and internet are involved. This gives us special laws to prohibit computer intrusion (we've had wire fraud statutes since 1910) and special patents for "carrying out traditional business XYZ, but over http".
I can understand the argument that to support budding e-commerce, you want to give them a temporary reprieve from some normal costs of business. But the expiration of such grace periods shouldn't be newsworthy, it should just be expected.
Its about time this happened.
Democratic businessman Rollie Heath, Owens' challenger in November's gubernatorial election, is pushing for Colorado to join the tax project.
He said that not taxing online sales puts local businesses at a competitive disadvantage.
"I just have a strong bias against having our own business having to compete unfairly with somebody who can send the same product in here from out of state," Heath said.
Sure, some businesses have suffered quite a loss due to the internet, but many businesses rely upon the internet to order items for themselves. Restaurants for wine, bike shops for parts, used book stores that buy, sell, and trade on the internet. All of these types of stores and shops would be hit by this tax as well as Joe consumer. And on top of this point, would this not increase the amount of items ordered directly from countries such as Canada and Mexico?
Drat, I was going to just moderate in this thread, but this is too good for me to pass up.
No one is stopping brick and mortar stores from selling online. Also, when online stores sell things to people who are within their own state they charge sales tax anyways. I think that this is fair and equitable. There is no reason why my state should be trying to tax a business that is located in california for selling something to me.
Also, some states don't have sales tax, so they already have an "unfair" advantage over businesses based in places which do have sales tax.
Of course, I'm fundamentally against "general" taxation and believe that our tax forms should include an itemized list that we can select to spend our portion of the tax we paid on. That way programs that were universally dislike would disappear quickly, programs that just a few people liked could be supported somewhat, but very popular programs would get even more money. I'm also against Social Security and Medicare. Mostly because I'll never collect SocSec, and even when my wife and I were both unemployed we didn't qualify for Medicare and as a consequence have large amounts of medical bills. So I'm paying all of this money out into services I will never see a return from, and a good 40% of my tax money gets taken to fund a military industrial complex that I don't support!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Same for many agricultural products. The undisputed leader of agriculture subsidies in ADM, supermarket to the world. Europe subsidizes its agriculture industry, just like the US.
Bush just slapped tariffs on steel, tariffs on lumber from Canada, and gave cash and loan subsidies to the airlines. All the Republican administrations - Reagan, Bush I, all believed in a large central government that centralized economic power, and redistributed wealth from the middle class to the rich. So did Clinton. Free markets are like a free lunch - ain't no such thing.
When the US says other countries should open their market and lower trade barriers, they mean just that - OTHER COUNTRIES. Not the US. We play by our own set of rules.
When other countries subsidize their industries and protect their local businesses, we call that SOCIALISM. When the US subsidizes our industries and protect our local business, we call that CAPITALISM. See how it works?
There are two types of people; those who divide people into two types of people, and those who don't.
It's great to see that the internet has succeeded to the point that government wants to tax it. What's too bad is that many ecommerce businesses see their only advantage to be price. And if 4.5-9% in sales tax will cut into your orders that much, you are already among the living dead. Those that live by price, die by price. You can't make money selling $.99 for $1.00. For that matter, it's damn hard to make profit selling $1.00 for $1.10.
$G
-- $G
Why don't we just try taxing imports? Works well for the Chinese and every other country that has positive GDP growth this year.
Both the US and China are members of the WTO, which makes it very difficult to put new tariffs in place. While China certainly has more trade restrictions than the US, the main reason for the trade imbalance is that the China has something to offer that the US wants (cheap, simple goods like toys and Halloween decorations) but there are few american goods that are affordable to the Chinese (this has little to do with tariffs, but rather with the fact that the average Chinese has a monthly salary that is one tenth the average American's).
The suggestion that tariffs are essential for growth and prosperity is ridiculous, the US and other of the worlds richest countries all have long-standing free-trading policies. The fact that China has higher GDP growth than the US should be attributed to the enormous opportunities that have become available during the last 20 years as the country has opened up economically. It is also much easier to have a high GDP growth if your current GDP is one tenth of the most modern countries (like the US).
Tor