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U.S. Ecommerce To Be Broadly Taxed?
fl!ptop writes "ZDnet has a story about U.S. Senators proposing sweeping changes to how Americans are taxed for online purchases. As proposed, businesses would be required to collect sales taxes and send them to the state the purchase was shipped to. As a small business owner that primarily sells via ecommerce, I am shuddering at the prospect of having to deal with government sales tax forms and coupon books for 30 or more states. Will I have to register with each state's tax department? As an ecommerce Web developer, I'm also wondering what implications this will have on maintaining code that calculates sales taxes, expecially in states like Ohio where they differ by county and municipality."
Agreed... Sales tax isn't regressive or progressive - the middle class pays a higher share of it than poor or rich folk, because a higher percentage of our income is spent on taxable goods.
Of course if the American public continues to vote Republican (or rather, continues to turn a blind eye toward the widespread electioneering going on with black-box vote tabulation servers </brokenRecord>), and the next GOP monarchy continues in the footsteps of King George, then it won't be too long until all US taxes are regressive. I have no doubt they'll find a way to make sales taxes regressive as well, probably with some more legislation-disguised-as-free-trade-agreement... "It's not fair to Chinese slave-based manufacturers to charge sales tax on their consumer goods, but not on goods from Mexican farmers, so we will now charge sales tax on food too."