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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.
Amazon thinks Texas is bad? Illinois is trying to get about 6 years back-taxes from online shoppers They want everyone who purchased goods in the past 6 years online to pay back-sales-taxes on those goods. How that is considered legal is amazing.
http://archive.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/12/state-to-offer-sales-tax-amnesty-for-online-shoppers.html
Last I checked, that makes Amazon tax evaders. They broke the law, and are now fugitives from justice. So I assume the state of Washington will be aggressively tracking them down and extraditing them to Texas for trial. Or maybe the state of New York will seize their assets on Wall St to pay the bill. Or maybe the feds will be getting involved and garnishing their profits.
Oh, wait. Sorry. That would be if a real person didn't pay a $269,000 tax bill. This is a corporation not paying a $269,000,000 tax bill, so they might get a slap on the wrist.
I am officially gone from
No, if every state stood up to parasites like Amazon, they'd go out of business, leaving the field clear for thousands of small businesses to spring up. That's the long-term win, not kowtowing to corporate bastards.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The only state that's NOT having budget problems is North Dakota. Ellen Brown says North Dakota is sitting pretty because they own the Bank of North Dakota.
See How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street.
All the other states are slaves to their financiers on Wall Street. For example, the City of Phoenix (Arizona) borrowed a billion dollars over the past 5 years to build out the water system. Now the water department wants to raise an extra $24million a year by raising water fees... 'Cause the usury always gets paid first.
I calculate that the interest charge on a billion dollars a year (at 5%) is $50million. If Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the Bank of Arizona would have financed the Phoenix water expansion (at, say, 3%). Most of the $50million the city is now bleeding out to Wall Street would instead be flowing into the state's treasury.
The financial crisis is easily fixable, with the right solutions. Money and the Crisis of Civilization, and ... Richard Clark's A Bailout for the People are also on my recommended reading list.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
These tax breaks are the great folly of our time. They can bring in a large-looking number of jobs to an area and make a politician look good for a limited amount of time, then the companies bail and often the taxpayers got very little for their money.
It's amazing that everyone thinks that big business is what drives jobs. That's a joke. The real job growth comes with small business. Big businesses will soon just be only the elite people at the top ordering all their stock from the 3rd world sweatshops. They aren't going to save the economy of the U.S. Why aren't we spending our money to support these small businesses that actually care about their communities instead of giving these huge breaks to companies that will leave at the drop of a hat. My guess it all has to do with who have the most lobbyists.
IANAL, but I've done a lot of tax programming for major retailers over the years.
While I agree that sales taxes are ridiculous and hard and all that, I feel it's important to point out that Amazon actually has a presence in Texas, and therefore when they sell product to Texans they actually do need to be collecting sales tax and remitting it to the State of Texas. This is commonly known as "nexus" in sales/use tax circles. This is what Texas is asking for - sales/use tax from sales to Texans from Amazon (who has a presence in Texas and is therefore subject to the laws of Texas with regards to their sales in Texas).
If Amazon was being told they needed to collect on behalf of, for example, Maine, they have the absolute right to tell Maine's comptroller to go straight to hell. In fact, as a citizen of Maine, I'd love to be able to listen to that conversation. I'll never be able to tell our comptroller to go to hell, so it'd be great to be able to hear someone else say it.
Amazon has no presence here in Maine, therefore they have no obligation to follow Maine's regulations surrounding sales/use taxes, which are intrastate law, not interstate. The sales/use tax on things I buy from Amazon is my responsibility to track as a Mainer doing business with a company outside the state, and I owe that money to Maine at the end of the year (and we have a system called "Alternative Use Tax" where I pay a small stipend based on income tax to cover any incidental out-of-state purchases I happen to make if I don't want to track them all, which I use).
But Amazon has a presence in Texas. In the same way that the company I currently work for has to start collecting and remitting State sales taxes every time we open our first store in each State (or call center, or warehouse, or business office, or whatever), Amazon really does owe that sales tax to the State of Texas, whether they have been collecting it from their customers or not.
Now, they can certainly choose to pull out of Texas in order to avoid having to collect taxes there, that's within their rights. But they still owe the State of Texas $269 million (plus whatever other sales they make before they finish the pullout), because they were supposed to be collecting that money from their customers who live in Texas for the entire time they've had a presence there.
Note to Amazon: Please come to Maine. We could use the jobs. I'll happily pay sales tax on purchases made from you.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Texas is after sales taxes from before Amazon came to the state.
Yes actually. the poor spend near 100% of their income on basic goods and necessities and outnumber the wealthy 10 to 1.
A wealthy person only buys so much crap. A hypothetical 10% sales tax takes ~10% of a poor persons income while the same 10% sales tax may take 0.01% of a wealthy persons income.
The only way for sales tax to be close to "flat" is if you charged it on the purchase of financial instruments like stock.
"retardican", that's good. I've had this argument with similarly unenlightened people before. The argument goes:
Them: No public money for research unless it is medical research.
Me: Hmmm....quantum mechanics and relativity, modern techno-stuff is built on it, couldn't get funded these days.
Them: Uh...uh...yeah, but I'm talking about pie in the sky research.
Me: That was pie in sky, so was group theory, which underpins transaction security you can buy stuff on-line.
Them: Yeah, well, they could point to something useful.
Me: No they couldn't, Galois died in 1932.
Them: Oh, okay, but not social research.
Me: So, you don't want to know what social problems have solutions, like failure of schools?
Them: Okay, you made your point.
Two months later:
Them: No public money for research unless it is medical research.
Me: Recall we had this argument 2 months ago and you admit you lost.
Them: What was your reasoning again?
You see, there's no talking sense to these people, they cannot keep anything abstract in their heads for longer than a gnat's attention span.
Bullshit. You worked your ass off, AND GOT LUCKY. You didn't get sick, or have to take care of a relative. You had no financial misfortune to overcome. You were born intelligent enough to take advantage of opportunity when it came. I'm also willing to bet you are white, and a native English speaker. Working your ass off is not sufficient. Not everyone is as smart or as lucky as or as white as you, and to suggest that poverty is their fault ignores your own good fortune. Yes, it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But it is also possible to work just as hard as you did, and have bad things happen to you. The whole "the poor are poor because they are not as good as me" idea was rejected with the rest of Victorian ideology. You sir are a throwback.