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California Assembly Approves Internet Tax
ClientNine writes "California could collect more than $1 billion a year by taxing Amazon and other online retailers if a bill approved by the Assembly becomes law. Assemblyman Charles Calderon, a Democrat from Whittier, says his legislation doesn't impose a new sales tax, but extends one that California should already have been enforcing. AB155 passed, 47-16, with the support of one GOP lawmaker Tuesday. It now heads to the Senate. Other Republicans rejected the bill because they said it would invite lawsuits, drive business out of California, and get the state entangled in the messy task of regulating the Internet."
Yeah, and I laughed.
Considering the history of business in the world I know for a fact that without regulation, rules, and governance those corporations will steal, poison and murder to make more money.
So why not allow the government to do it? We have more control over them than we do businesses.
Since 1910, governments have killed approximately 200 million of their OWN citizens, typically through planned genocide. (The number rises over 1 billion if you include non-citizens killed in war.) How many millions have corporations killed? (Essentially zero million.)
>>>Get rid of government
Libertarians are not anarchists. Libertarians support having a government in order to keep the corporations from treading on Citizens' Rights. In fact many libertarians, like me, would abolish corporations completely. Instead you would have direct-owned companies, were the CEO and his partners would be directly liable for their acts.
So for example if a car they built blew-up, they could be charged with manslaughter and thrown in jail. NO corporate shield. The corporate license wouldn't even exist. The No-Corporation libertarian world would actually be BETTER than the corporate-dominated world we have now.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I run a small online retailer.
Here's where things get confusing, and why the law concerns me. While I'm not a resident of California, nor is my company based in California, I purchase hosting services at two different companies that are in California. One version of the law that I saw says that I must now collect taxes from California residents, because this bill asserts that because I have a physical presence in California (while that presence technically only occupies 2U in a server farm) that's enough to establish nexus.
At the moment, my business is based in Oregon. I don't have to compute or collect ANY sales taxes at all. However, if the version of the law I saw passes, I'd be presented with a choice: I could re-engineer my business processes to collect sales taxes from Californians, or I could move my webhosting to a different state (like, say back here to Oregon). The first part seems simple enough, until I discovered that every county in California has a different sales tax, and I'm responsible for knowing what county somebody is in and applying the right sales tax formula.
Guess what I'm going to do? You guessed it: find another webhost that's going to get me out of California's greedy paws.
This does have some interesting, and far reaching, consequences. For example: isn't eBay in California? Does that mean that every eBayer will now need to collect sales taxes from California residents regardless of the seller's state of residence?