Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Pulling Out of Texas Over $269 Million Tax Bill
ralphart writes with this excerpt from the Dallas Morning News:
"As a result of an ongoing tax dispute with Texas, Amazon.com has decided to take its ball and go home. The online retailer said Thursday that it would shutter its Irving distribution facility April 12 and cancel plans to hire as many as 1,000 additional workers rather than pay Texas what the state says is owed in uncollected sales tax. Texas wants $269 million from Seattle-based Amazon in past-due sales tax. It sent the bill to the company last October."
We've discussed the online retailer's tax battles with other states in the past.
Political corruption and whacked out laws are a very good reason for avoiding Texas either for businesses or for people. They have some of the sickest, knee jerk, back water laws known to man.
The problem right now is that the TX legislature got full of a bunch of Retardicans and PeeTardiers who want government to simultaneously provide them cheap everything without being willing to pay for it.
They have this lying jerk "Michael Quinn Sullivan" who runs around claiming that the public education system is "wasting money" because it has a "1 to 1 ratio" of teachers to nonteachers. Technically he's true - because his definition of "teacher" is "runs a homeroom."
He counts as nonteachers the speech therapists, sign language interpreters, ESL teachers, art teachers, music teachers, and anyone else who teaches but doesn't run a homeroom. And then on top of it he counts everyone down to the janitors and bus drivers in his "1 to 1 ratio." I bet there is a 1 to 1 ratio, but it's not a bad thing - ask his supporters what category of employee they can cut without actually screwing up the education system, and these retards just default back to "but but but 1 to 1 ratio but but but" sputtering and retardedness.
The rest of the state budget is similarly afflicted. Their "Dan Patrick" Senator actually was caught on his radio show saying that anything but engineering and medical research is "research nobody cares about."
That's what you get when you let the extreme right-wing nutbags into power.
FUCK YEAH!
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' budget YEAH!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The problems have absolutely nothing to do with lack of income tax in Texas. Texas is horribly mismanaged and has more than its share of corruption and theft of public funds. The governor is one of the more prominent criminals; which even includes using eminent domain to take private property to gift to his friends.
Texas is an extremely wealthy state (oil, gas, technology, manufacturing, exports/imports, transportation hub) and has had big budget problems before. They've always been addressed by simply clamping down on the extremely huge excesses which are extremely common in Texas politics. It may take a couple of years but its easily doable. Worst case, roads which were never needed will hopefully, simply not get built. Some public park facilities will be shut down. Some corporate shelters are tightened.
The day Texas requires income tax is the day Texas criminals and politicians have won, leaving the general population to simply suck it up. Most other states have income tax because they don't have the critical mass in corporate presence or the population to sustain on sales tax alone. No ifs, ands, or buts, if Texas needs income tax, the corruption is so bad, politicians literally need to be lynched in the streets.
Life isn't fair you fucking baby - deal with it. The government has no role whatsoever in trying to make it fair.