Every Day's a Tax Holiday At Amazon

theodp writes "With Black Friday here, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reminds readers of how Amazon.com undersells Best Buy, the Apple store, and almost everybody else. Read his lips: no sales taxes. Unless you live in KS, KY, NY, ND, or WA, you'll pay no sales tax on many purchases from Amazon, giving Amazon a huge — and largely hidden — price advantage over most other national retailers. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is certainly no fan of taxes — he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation, and recently ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax, a good investment for someone who's cashed in close to $800,000,000 in Amazon stock this year alone. So, is Amazon's tax-free status unfair? Of course it is, says Manjoo. Amazon has physical operations in 17 states in which the company and its employees enjoy the fruits of local taxes — police and fire protection, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure that make its operations possible. Yet Amazon skirts tax collection in most of these places through clever legal tricks."

Comments

Re:BS

[Entrope]

Typical liberal response. Government employees make more than private sector employees, but it's because of EVUL CORPORATIONS. The solution isn't for government to also tighten its belt and become more efficient -- the solution is to return everybody to standards of living circa 1970! (I adjusted your "past 30 years or so" to 40 years because of the serious inflation in the 1970s, and you cited inflation as a factor in the wage imbalance.)

Re:Shipping Costs, Etc.

[tompaulco]

The sales tax is a whole different matter, it does create an unfair advantage because Amazon just shifts responsibility for the tax to the end customer.
No, it does not, no matter how many times this comes up and no matter how many times slashdot posts an article, there IS NO TAX ADVANTAGE. You are REQUIRED to pay Use Tax on purchase that you did not pay sales tax on it. If you do not, then YOU ARE EVADING TAXES. This is ILLEGAL. What Amazon doing is neither evading nor avoiding taxes. They are not required by law to collect taxes in jurisdictions in which they have no presence and so they don't. YOU are still required to pay the taxes and if you don't, then it is YOU who is doing something illegal.