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Amazon Drops California Associates to Avoid Sales Tax
PCM2 writes "Residents of California who participate in the Amazon Associates Program received an email warning them that the program will be terminated as soon as a new California law goes into effect. The law, which CA governor Jerry Brown signed, would require online retailers to collect sales tax on purchases. According to Amazon's statement, 'We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It is supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside California, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors.'"
...because they are unconstitutional and counterproductive.
Now please extend this to the other 49 states.
If all the states had the tax and so there would be no advantage to leaving California, why wouldn't Amazon continue the program?
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Yeah that 20-25% in defense spending is really out of control compared to the >50% (and growing) in entitlement spending, watch out!
Good one, Governor Moonbeam! You just killed the revenue stream of roughly 25k Amazon affiliates. So instead of just being content with the revenue collected from the income tax of those affiliates, you decide to double-dip and tax not only the income earned by the affiliate but the transaction as well. Instead of allowing you to double-dip, Amazon pulls the plug on their affiliate program in CA and your projected $200+M tax revenue increase goes up in smoke. CA is a turd circling the drain. They might as well give up and become part of Mexico already.
I just want to know why it is that when times are tough everyone except the government is expected to make due with less. Why don't politicians have to share in the hardship? Why don't liberals seem to understand that imposing a tax has a net effect of reducing economic activity? Why would you want to reduce economic activity when we're still in the midst of the worst recession in 2 generations?
"Gee, I can buy it for $50 at the store today, or $50 on Amazon and have it Monday, but I'll get free shipping ..." - most people will just buy it locally.
Colorado did the same thing a couple years ago, and Amazon responded the same way.
Good on Amazon.
Because of the closing of many neighbourhood book and CD shops, and the shrinking selection at those locations that remain open, you often can't "buy it at the store today" and online is the only way to go anyway.
Yeah that 20-25% in defense spending is really out of control compared to the >50% (and growing) in entitlement spending, watch out!
The "entitlement spending" as you put it at least goes back into the US economy. "Defence" spending goes to chew up the top 10cm of Afghanistan.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You're forgetting the fact that most big-box retailers don't have nearly the same inventory as Amazon and other online retailers. Some products -- like new turntables as I recently found out -- are impossible to buy in a brick and mortar store unless you live in a large metropolitan area because local stores simply do not carry a wide selection.
This has nothing to do with the tax then does it? If you can't buy it at X then how much tax Y charges doesn't really matter anymore.
Also, might the unfair tax advantage of amazon have made it impossible for the local shops to compete? So if Amazon did NOT have its unfair tax advantage, you would still have a choice. But no, you saved a penny or two and now you got no choice.
Free market, I see you do work, I just don't like your results.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Keep in mind that you're still supposed to pay the equivalent "use tax", so any savings were a lot less, unless you're a tax cheat. The vast majority of people, given the opportunity, proved to be tax cheats, which was no surprise.
All California is doing is saying "if you want to compete, compete on an even footing, and don't enable tax cheats." Is it a cash grab? Look around - state governments everywhere need the cash. Which is better - that Amazon be forced to compete fairly, or that you pay for a state bail-out?
No, moron. The entitlement spending goes straight to China. Ever seen a fat, system-gaming woman in the Wal-Mart line with her 10 children all had by different fathers and wonder how she has enough money to buy 50 pairs of No-Bo underwear for each one? At least in the defense industry, the country is keeping American technical jobs and some manufacturing on American soil. I'm pretty sure that those bombs used to turn Afghanistan and soon Pakistan (sigh) to glass were made here in the "good ol' U.S.A."
Because things get insanely hairy. For instance, what is the tax rate for an affiliate in California? There isn't a single rate for the state, it varies by location. Besides the state tax you've got county and/or city taxes plus the occasional special tax district. And no you can't go just by ZIP code, because we've got plenty of ZIP codes that span multiple tax jurisdictions with different tax rates. And the state doesn't provide Amazon with any way to get an authoritative (as in "If you charge the rate we give you, you can't be legally touched if it turns out it was the wrong rate.") answer to the question of what the tax rate is for a given affiliate address.
And that's just California taxes. What happens when the affiliate is in California, the buyer is in Texas where Amazon has a warehouse and thus a physical presence, and both states claim sales tax is due? Does Amazon charge taxes for both states on the same sale? Or if Amazon only charges taxes for one state, what happens when the other sues for failure to collect taxes due under it's laws?
The states want to have these taxes collected, but they don't want to answer the hard questions about the actual implementation: what are the rules for which jurisdiction applies, and how is the merchant told what rates apply to any given transaction? Until the states are willing to address those questions, IMO actions like California's are simply unfair.
Riiiiiiight, because companies like Boeing, Northrup, General Dynamics, etc, etc, don't employ anyone in the US.
Exactly where do you think that money would go if Uncle Sam didn't take it from people in the US to begin with?
"The "entitlement spending" as you put it at least goes back into the US economy."
Yeah. I'll pay you $50 to clean my pool, and you pay me $50 for me to clean your pool. Instead of doing something useful, the net effect of entitlements is zero. Or, at least it would be zero if there were no sociological effects of receiving entitlements as a way of life instead of how it was intended: as temporary assistance. But the fact is that approximately 50% of the population of the US pays no income taxes. Have you ever dealt with a person who has made living on the public dole a way of life? I have. Their sense of pride, their work ethic, and their ability to reason is completely destroyed. Perhaps this was the intent of LBJ's Great Society all along. It certainly makes these people easier to manipulate if they can't stand on their own 2 feet.
Amazon is fighting the good fight, but it is a losing battle.
With states hurting for tax dollars, online retailers are being targeted as a source of income for the states.
The days of tax free internet orders is coming to an end.
I do have sympathy for online retailers, if there was a simple tax rate for each state, it would not be so bad, but each county, each city, certain merchandise all have different tax rates. What a accounting nightmare to keep up with. Every time you turn around another city council is passing another tax on something, having to keep up with would be next to impossible.
Yeah that 20-25% in defense spending is really out of control compared to the >50% (and growing) in entitlement spending, watch out!
The only difference between military spending and entitlement spending is that you have to blow things up to get your free medical, free food, free housing, and free childcare.
the real problem: Defense spending
I love being able to give people new information! As it turns out, California doesn't have their own army. They also don't have their own navy, air force, or marines. In fact, California's percentage of defense spending as a fraction of their total budget is very nearly zero percent.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
This is all a game between companies and the government (state and federal). CA has no money because they are stupid and elect individuals who spend it faster than it can be earned. The idea CA has is to tap revenue from outside the state, which is of course illegal since CA is not our central government.
The federal government is playing the same games since they are out of money (which is funny when you think that they are the ones with a printing press), but that's why you see Obama saying bad things about ATMs and Jets my guess being that ATMs and jets don't pay taxes.
All of this comes down to one thing, spending. Assuming you are not checking your bank account to see if your SS check was direct deposited into your checking account, the US will be at 200% GDP vs debt in our lifetime. That means that if every single American got a second full time job and paid all money from both jobs to the government then we could pay for our spending. As it stand now if we took all the money, 100%, from the top earners in the US FOREVER we still would never pay our debt off at the rate our spending is increasing.
Spending. Spending. Spending. Until we realize spending is the problem, the problems will continue.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
How much do you suppose the state of California spends on defense? I agree as a nation we spend too much on defense, but I'm not sure what sales tax collection in California has to do with it.
Competition between out-of-state retailers and local business is not some new thing that arose with the internet. The Sears catalogue did the same thing in the 19th century and local businesses still survived. That there shall not be tariffs on commerce between states is a cornerstone of our nation. Do you want to junk it?
In Europe there are sales taxes in all countries and Amazon's local operations are able to work within the system. This is just a side effect of the US states not working together as one entity. It's very short termist and selfish on both sides.
The Supreme Court already made their stance on the exact Affiliate issue known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota
"Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992) is a Supreme Court ruling concerning use tax. Quill Corporation is an office supply retailer. Quill had no physical presence in North Dakota (neither a sales force, nor a retail outlet), however it did have a licensed computer software program that some of its North Dakota customers used to check Quill's current inventories and place orders directly. North Dakota attempted to impose a use tax on Quill, which was struck down by the Supreme Court."
Maybe Amazon should resort to their "Mechanical Turk". It would be a better use than the 40% of all Mechanical Turk jobs that are devoted to spamming.
Or maybe they can go to the cloud! "Yay, cloud!" :-(
The truth: Amazon could figure it out - they just can't be bothered. They WANT to drop their affiliates, since they no longer need them to "get the Amazon name out." If you're an Amazon affiliate, your days are numbered - Amazon just wants to be able to blame someone else when they dump you.
You're an idiot. He does not mean California's defense spending, he means Defense spending in general. As usual, your "new information!" is useless.
Do you even read what you're typing? At least try and get the facts correct. Free medical has not been that for a long time, with the exception of the unmarried troop on active duty using a military treatment facility. Troops have to pay for family dental for example and once you leave active duty you have to pay for your medical care too. Prescriptions outside the basics genrally have to be ordered by mail for a copay. Free food and housing are not that. There are allowances for these things, but they are based on a standard of living from 40 years ago as to what size place yu might need and never covers all the bills. Child care has never been free.
Pretty weak cornerstone to base a nation on. Also, the tax is not on interstate commerce - the goods are free to travel through the state without accruing tax liability. It's only when they find their way into the hands of an end user that they are liable to the sales tax, or the equivalent state use tax. If you can show that sales taxes, levied by the state against the local individual, as opposed to being levied by the state against the vendor, are unconstitutional, you'd have a point.
Just as important, it's not interstate commerce when you have a business presence in-state. The affiliates ARE that presence - affiliates are, after all, affiliated with Amazon, that's why they're called affiliates, duh!!! They're paid by Amazon, not some 3rd party. They're no different than having a commission sales rep working the state, because that's what they are, commission sales reps.
I've said it before and I'll say it AGAIN:
Tax the shipping companies and you wouldn't have all these problems!!!
Tell you what, politicians are terrible at looking "outside the box" for solutions.
:T:R:A:N:S:
It's been that way for civilians too. Ever notice how the poverty line was determined from 1950's figures?
C|N>K
Except it won't be the same price at both locations because a B&M store still has to pay rent, utilities, pay their cashiers etc... Having a physical presence in a community costs more than a web site and drop shipping from a warehouse in BFE.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Are you at all familiar with the defense procurement process? Do you *REALIZE* the regulations you have to comply with in order to even source parts from a foreign entity? "Export controls" are a *HUGE* headache for anyone in the DoD's procurement chain, such that the vast, VAST majority of Defense dollars stay States-side.
In fact, the net effect is such that it entirely negates your point: dollars spent on munitions manufactured by US firms are deployed in theater and used for creative destruction far from our shores. Would you rather we started carpet bombing Chicago instead?
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm pretty positive that this will blow up in California's face. You can't fix a deficit that big by adding a new tax; you're just going to drive business and revenue out of the state. There was a moratorium on internet sales taxes for multiple reasons at the turn of the century, not the least of which was that it threatened business revenue. (Among the others were double taxation because multiple states might legally be able to tax any given order.) I guess states are getting desperate and stupid with the recession still going on...
The sharpest blade is no match for the sharpest mind.
Considering that the "local mom&pop" only has to worry about the one rate that they are responsible for, it's not surprising they can keep track of it.
Apples and orchards.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I just want to know why it is that when times are tough everyone except the government is expected to make due with less. Why don't politicians have to share in the hardship?
If you think that social security is too large, say that you think that the poor should make due with less. If you think that military spending is too large, say that you think we should bring the troops home. If you think that we spend too much on public infrastructure, say that the government should spend less money building roads, etc... All of those are valid views. However, realize that in none of those cases it isn't the government whose life is affected as government isn't any single entity separate from the people, neither does the government have feelings or a soul.
There is no such thing as attacking "government spending" even though certain people would like to make government appear as a faceless opponent that takes money away from the hard working people and burns it. When you say that government should do with less, you should specify which of the services that the government provides for people should be cut. When you speak about government as it would be a separate entity with goals, motivations, feelings, ability to make sacrifices, etc. I get the same feeling I get when I hear a paranoid person talking about "them". It doesn't make any sense as there isn't such a creature called "government" any more than there is "them". There is just a list of services that the democratic society has decided to provide to the people, the employees needed to provide them and the taxes that have democratically been set in order to provide those services. That being the case, attack the services, not the government.
This is true for Canada as well. Sales tax for the appropriate province is applied at checkout, and everything seems to work out fine. And it still ends up being way cheaper to order from Amazon (and I say this from a province with a 13% sales tax).
I'd recommend reading the debates around the writing of the Constitution (Signet Classics has published many of the relevant texts). Free commerce between states is vital for keeping the nation unified.
Use taxes are a fairly recent innovation that seeks to get around the longstanding tradition of no taxes on out-of-state purchases. They are a perversion of the law.
I don't dispute that. But usually when the question of Amazon and taxes comes up, some on Slashdot post as if, regardless of presence, Amazon is doing wrong. They are doing nothing different from the long, accepted mail order tradition.
The "how DARE you keep what you want to earn" is the modern day equivalent to the "how DARE you want to be free" mentality of the slavery days. It's just more subtle and widespread than it was 150 years ago.
I bet next you're going to tell us how we are all born into a "social contract" that we never agreed to and have no recourse against, right? Or that we all owe our success to society for letting us be free, because we couldn't have possible earned our success ourselves and freedom is a gift benevolently bestowed upon us by society and not self-evident, right?
It's really convenient how keeping what *you* earn isn't a civil right, but keeping what *other* people earn is...
The people this really hurts are the affiliates who are no longer seeing revenue from Amazon.
I would say it's more greed on Amazon's part. They know they can strong arm with tactics like this and buy legislators so that is the approach they will take here in the states.
I know there will be a lot of flaming about Amazon not "paying their fair share" but the fact is, they aren't the ones that pay this... their customers are. Paying taxes is not our civic duty. It's not un-patriotic to feel the urge to keep your own damned money. There is a simple solution to Californians problem: stop spending so much.
Does this mean newegg will have to charge sales tax to those who live outside CA?
This comment section shows why our government has so many problems: citizens who blindly believe political rhetoric as fact and then continue to spout it and vote along lines which further the goals of the spin-doctors.
Examples:
50% of the people in the US pay no taxes and it isn't the rich.
Defense spending is where all the money goes.
Neither of the above is anywhere near the truth.
Every political entity has its own agenda and in a case like this one, so do businesses.
Amazon and the e-tailers have one: continue sales without tax to maintain the margin advantage.
Big brick and mortar stores (Walmart and such) have an agenda as well: to reduce e-tailer advertising in Cali because they are well aware that collecting state specific taxes for an e-tailer is not feasible. (Far too many variations in tax laws in the US.)
Customers will not see any direct changes: brick and mortar prices will remain what they are and e-tailer prices- and taxes- will also not change. The only losers will be those California residents who earn a portion of their income from advertising. They will not be getting paid by companies like Amazon anymore.
This is what I believe will actually happen, not spin, not an agenda. I don't live in California and the case has no direct bearing on me.
Discussing defense spending or the Teabag Party idea that half of the people in the US are not citizens is just muddying the waters and allowing politicians free reign to continue to mislead the public and treat us as idiots.
This is about sales tax people, and the fact that the Federal government needs to reform sales tax as it applies to internet vendors.
The vendors can NOT afford to deal with each and every tax code in the country- it is far too complex at this time, and if they comply with one out of state code they will have to comply with all of them.
However, local government does have the right to put their own codes in place- except where it conflicts with federal law.
A federal law that requires a common tax rate for the entire US, supercedes local code and applies to online vendors is needed.
As someone who purchases online as much as possible, I enjoy how often I am not taxed- but I recognize the need.
Now- discussing the issue at hand is what the founding fathers intended when this country began.
Dicussing other issues- defense spending, immigration, foreign wars- that is what the current political parties would prefer we do as a people. It keeps us from paying attention to what is really going on and lets them maintain the status quo.
Your choice folks.
Linux computers, watercooled, photography
If you explain to the Mob that you can't make your payment and instead of paying them what they want, you'd have to go out of business. How about taking a little bit less? No deal. Pay us.
That's the Mob as well as government. What they really care about is getting their cut. The negative consequences of their actions...they don't care about that.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You can always emigrate. Read Plato's Crito for a classical argument about recourse to the social contract (one the American founding fathers were well aware of).
Natural rights theory traditionally relies on a belief in a higher power who endows human beings with some rights regardless of what the community says. Theism isn't too popular these days, especially on Slashdot. Once you recognize there's no convincing proof of God for the people around you, the only defensible forms of political theory are the various brands of utilitarianism: you have these freedoms, because the community in general gets on better if you have them, not because they are somehow innate.
no, let's start with texas and then sweep through the south. It does not negate his point: Munitions are valuable good and they are created here with our scarce resources and end up as heaping piles of rubble over there. There is a massive opportunity cost of not using these resources for building ourselves up rather than tearing someone down. Creative destruction abroad is wasteful compared to domestic investment, unless your playing some Machiavellian game whereupon foreign aggression is actually indirectly benefiting the economy. In any event, any such plan would rely on pure conjecture and a healthy dose of negligence with regard to history.
California props up the federal government and the defense budget by paying out more than it receives.
As a general rule, I find that conservatives and libertarians tend to think about consequences to tax policy, regulation, etc. If I take away money from person X, he'll have less money to save and spend. How will that impact the economy? If I put a regulation on the company, how will they respond to the increased cost? Will it outweigh the benefit of the regulation?
Liberals don't tend to think like this as much as far as I can tell from their reasoning.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
There's an Amazon warehouse just outside the city here (although, strangely, I've never had anything shipped from it, things I order always seem to come from the other end of the country). When you go past, you really see the scale of their operation. Their warehouse is much larger than any local shops and almost as big as the out-of-town shopping centre, and it doesn't contain all of their inventory.
Remember the old dot-com joke, that Amazon made a loss on every sale, but made up for it in volume? It worked. They now shift so much that they can maintain the prices that they introduced as loss-leaders to get market share, only now their overheads are so low per item that they can undercut most other places. They can easily undercut companies that have to have physical store space for customers to walk around.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nonsense.
I use Amazon extensively and from my experience the savings far exceed the difference between taxed (7% in NE) and untaxed sales prices. Free shipping and rapid deliveries make home shopping nearly as convenient as local shopping, especially for 70+ people like myself. While many local stores disavow warranty or service problems (the stickers say "Don't bring this XXX back to the store. Contact the manufacturer"), Amazon makes returning merchandize free and easy, including printing RMAs from your online account. At tax time I total the amount of the sales for the previous year from emailed invoices and submit the sales tax on my State Income tax filing, in fulfillment of NE tax law. I have yet to see any local store offer the selection that Amazon does. As a Prime member my wife an I enjoy streaming movies to watch on our HD TV, and over 5,000 offerings are free, with the rest being offered at prices from 0.99 to 3.99 for 48 hours. Our most recent viewings include "True Grit (2010)" and "The King's Speech".
P.S. -- I don't work for Amazon.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
You could do all of this with a proper GIS setup. I don't know where you'd get the tax area data, but I'm betting the government either already has it or could make it fairly quickly.
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's not Amazon's job to figure it out.
As someone above said, "There isn't a single rate for the state, it varies by location. Besides the state tax you've got county and/or city taxes plus the occasional special tax district. And no you can't go just by ZIP code, because we've got plenty of ZIP codes that span multiple tax jurisdictions with different tax rates. And the state doesn't provide Amazon with any way to get an authoritative (as in "If you charge the rate we give you, you can't be legally touched if it turns out it was the wrong rate.") answer to the question of what the tax rate is for a given affiliate address."
I think so many people haven't bothered even looking at a mail-order coupon in ages (blame the Innert00bs :^) that they've forgotten this.
quit blaming Amazon and their "unfair" tax liability.
Did Amazon kill Blockbuster? No, technology did and a better competitor did. Same thing with local CD and book shops. Most locals don't go out of business with mail order companies, even those the size of Amazon. They go out of business because of other local competitors, their location became a hindrance, or their customers moved. Even companies like Wal-Mart didn't kill mom and pops, most mom and pops were killed by the first gen big box stores and more importantly they were killed by cars. Yeah, the widespread use of cars allowed people to not be trapped by local stores. Same goes for any other technology, now I can download my book. How is the local store supposed to compete with that? A kiosk can do it
What is amazing is you rant against Amazon and then notice the "use tax" side of the issue, which is, if your customers are not honest somehow its your fault. As in - Amazon is at fault for buyers through their website not adhering to the law.
No what California is saying, screw the law about interstate taxation and rulings related to it, we plan to intimidate companies into paying the tax - which isn't really what is going on here ... What is really going on is...
We are dumb asses who promised our supporters to the point we cannot pay up and damn if we don't need new tax revenue, would you please become the bogeyman and take the blame for collecting taxes our residents would never support if we did it directly.
Needless to say, this is all based on the typical bogus math politicians use which always underestimate costs and overestimate revenues gained.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And yet other online retailers handle this. Apple and Barnes and Noble both come to mind. Due to their extensive retail outlet infrastructure both have to collect sales tax in nearly every state. When you order something from either company an intelligent system determines where you live and charges the relevant taxes. I'd guess once a quarter the same intelligent system adds up how much it owes every state and locality in taxes and disburses funds. This isn't that difficult a problem. I'm a pretty poor programmer (I do more sys admin, and don't get to practice much) and I could code up a look up table and database system to handle it. It wouldn't be very scalable, but luckily Amazon can hire a few people way more skilled than I am for a short term contract (or use their own internal assets for a few weeks work) to take care of it.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Just ask the 100 biggest businesses in a state what they would like and give it to them.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Greed?
Nonsense. Do you make this stuff up as you write?
IF Amazon wanted to spend millions to bribe legislators that would only work if YOU voted in corrupt individuals, and why would you do that unless they offered free welfare benefits to YOU? So, who's being greedy? (See how easy it is to make up boogie men!)
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
And I am sure that it works out fine when you have set taxes at the state level. However, I live in the Chicago suburbs. My sales tax consists of some base state tax. An additional tax assessed by the county. Even some cities have an additional sales tax on top of that. Take for example Cook county. The total sales tax for state and cook county is 9.75%. It was up to 10.25% for about a year until it was repealed. I happen to live near the border of Cook county and DuPage county. The taxes in DuPage county are only 7.75%. It would be bad enough if Amazon had to collect different taxes for all 50 states, but it would be a nightmare for Amazon to have to adapt to even different tax codes at a county level like they are here in Illinois.
It's only when they find their way into the hands of an end user that they are liable to the sales tax, or the equivalent state use tax.
Sales tax is supposedly to pay for the goods relative burden imposed by the retail on the state's infrastructure. For goods shipped in by Amazon, this is already included in transportation costs. Seems the states are trying to double dip. They want to tax the burden and the rape the consumer.
Seems both state and federal entities really need to get their shit together and stop living above their means. The state only needs to pay for a modest amount of extras but its hard to hide their fraud, graft, and theft when their funds are as limited as should be. This isn't about taxes for the sake of taxes. These plays are about a much larger game - financial fraud which permeates politics.
Think about this. You pay taxes to your utilities which is supposed to be used to maintain and upgrade your utilities. Only the minimal is done and yet they demand ever higher fees and taxes to not do what they are being paid to do. They guys bribe politicians heavily.
We all pay sales taxes which exist to maintain basic infrastructure, state parks, utilities, and highways.
We all pay various fuel taxes which exist to maintain basic infrastructure and highways.
Seems we're all paying a shitload, multiple times, for shit which is largely not done, or is always the first to be shutdown in budget crunches. So ask yourself, who the fuck is getting on this money and why are they not actually required to do the job they've been paid to do?
Basically, if the level of taxes collected continues to fall, contrary to popular bullshit spread by politicians, the only negative is that the politicians are required to actually ONLY spend the available revenues ONLY on the shit we pay them to do and it suddenly becomes much harder for their to steal as they commonly do every day.
Now then, most states will tell you there are lots of problems because of falling tax revenues. That's a 100% bullshit lie. If you believe that, you're completely out of touch with reality. States are having problems because they've been spending vastly beyond their means on shit they absolutely should not be spending, and frequently on good 'ol boy projects which are poorly run and cost far beyond their bid. Basically, states wouldn't be having problems if they'd stop trying to eat lobster at every meal.
There's businesses that succeed on selling software just to calculate the taxes you need to collect from a buyer.
I really doubt it's Amazon strong-arming as much as the fucked up tax code.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
>And maybe the reason that those local stores closed down was from unfair competition - companies like Amazon that didn't have to charge sales taxes.
Here in Seattle, Amazon has to charge sales tax, yet they still have better prices than almost any local store. I think the lack of sales tax everywhere else is just gravy.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Pray tell, to what domestic use would you put depleted uranium, cordite, and lead?
You don't like foreign wars, which is a fine position to have. Don't bollix it all up with falsehoods about the DoD procurement process and where those dollars actually end up.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Amazon sells a much wider variety of goods than Apple and BN.
Different tax jurisdictions can have different taxes for different classes of goods, and what is considered "food" in one jurisdiction may be a "snack" in another. Add tax holidays for certain jurisdictions for certain classes of goods (defined only within that jurisdiction) for certain times of the year (defined only within that jurisdiction) and a broad unrelated selection like Amazon has gets unwieldy, beyond simple lookup tables.
More taxes, less jobs. VOTE FOR ME!
I wonder how many people will get put out of work by this tax?
Amazon gladly collects taxes for Kansas, because they have a large warehouse there right in the middle of the country. The population is low, and shopping opportunities are slim, so it does not really impact sales. I can see Amazon eventually only having infrastructure in a few key low sales states to avoid collecting sales tax in the big sales states.
"Amazon Drops California Associates to Avoid Sales Tax"
Should read:
Amazon Drops California Associates to Avoid COLLECTING Sales Tax ON BEHALF OF A GREEDY STATE GOVERNMENT.
Option 1: Amazon should spend millions of dollars on programmers, accountants, tax compliance attorneys, and so forth so that they can continue paying commissions to 25,000 affiliates (many of whom do report their income and provide taxes to the state of CA).
Option 2: Find affiliates in states that are friendly and don't employ mob-style tactics. When will these pols get it? There is not an endless supply of OPM (other people's money).
It won't go to the other 49 states because not all the states have Sales Tax.
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no state sales tax
Yes, unfair competition closed them down, namely the anti-compeditive practices of Wallmart, B&N, etc. Amazon had nothing to do with it.
Amazon does not specifically target local businesses for extermination like the big box stores. Amazon also helps brings products too market without slitting the throat of the supplier. Yes, Amazon does evade local taxes, but ironically they do so by supporting independent retailers, used book stores, etc. In fact, your favorite independent brick & mortar bookstore may've become dependent upon the money they earn from tax free sales on Amazon.
Amazon is a "grey hat" business for sure, their actions definitely carry some good and some bad, but all their retail competitors are hiding corpses under their black hats.
p.s. I've often used Amazon's only large "white hat" competitor abebooks for books. And then I found that abebooks actually emails you your old password if you do a password reset, meaning abebooks doesn't even hash your passwords. So I deleted any important information from my abebooks account and switched back to Amazon.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The Commerce Clause is a power listed in the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). The clause states that the United States Congress shall have power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
You may consider it a weak cornerstone to base a nation on, but it was an attempt to keep the States from putting tariff's on other States.
Maybe they could license the systems walmart.com uses. It's pretty damned certain that Walmart has a physical presence in every state and they sell a wide variety of products online. You're right that I underestimated the complexity of selling such a variety of items, but it still doesn't make the problem that much more difficult. You could just use some extra tables in the main product database to figure out how an individual product is classified in an individual locale. Add an optional field for tax holidays. Have someone who's job it is to enter those as they get announced.
It's still not the overwhelming amount of work you seem to think it is, and I can think of more than a few retailers who most certainly must have figured out a way to handle it. Nearly all department stores and discounts stores have physical presences in many if not most states, and have online stores with a huge variety of items in them. I would not be surprised if there weren't one or more off the self products or services you get to handle this for you.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Retailers operating nationwide seem to handle it just fine.
How about eliminate the sales tax entirely and just focus on the income tax then? Local businesses will then be able to compete better with the internet and revenue will still increase without targeting those who need to spend a greater % of their earnings to survive.
Wow sounds like someone got off the wrong side of the stimulus. This is chicken little all over again. Several states have passed these laws and the sellers continue to make money and the sky did not fall. There is no double dip we do not have to pay 200,00% for my 100 jobs. 11 years ago there was a budgetary surplus. Remember they sent every one a check. This surplus was achieved through raising taxes and cutting spending. The government is not the enemy; they are the immigrant workers we let deal with the shit jobs we are not willing to go out and do ourselves. Oh but they mostly get paid better, have health plans, and get a pension.
More nonsense. Are you letting your political ideology control your reasoning? (You have a hammer and everything you see is a nail.)
"Funny how Amazon "can't figure this out" with all their resources, but the local mom and pop nails it with few problems. "
Before I retired I wrote software for the Dept of Revenue, State of Nebraska. Taxes and their collection isn't a funny matter for anyone, and it is not surprising at all that Amazon "can't figure this out". My state is one of the smallest, population-wise. We have less than 2 million people living in 93 counties. But, at the time I retired 3 years ago, there existed in the state over 4,700 different taxing entities. Resident zip codes do not determine which taxing district a citizen resides in, even if they limited their shopping just to one location. Citizens can get their mail in one zip code but live in another. Strange as it may seem to you, many residents do not know which taxing district they live in and would not be able to supply that information to Amazon. Or, strange as it may seem to you, they frequently put the wrong information in forms they fill out, even if they fill in online digital forms that do not have to be scanned and fed to an OCR engine, which is yet another can of worms. So, even for a small state like Nebraska, tracking sales by over 4,700 taxing entities that are NOT distinguished by a zip code or address can be, and often is, a nightmare. But, don't feel bad. You not alone. A LOT of elected representatives have unrealistic expectations of what a computer program "should be" able to do.
Nebraska's constitution requires a balanced budget and the legislature is forbidden to spend more than the tax revenues take in, so there isn't a any negative income or sales tax calculations using convoluted rules to benefit those who are more equal than others, like CA, Tx, NY, MA and other heavily indebted states have. To require Amazon to keep track of the taxing districts and policies of 50 states and the territories of the USA and do their tax collections would put a burden on Amazon that could, and probably would, drive it out of business. Add to that the legal costs that would most definitely arise because some political or selfish-interest groups would see Amazon as a Golden Goose that they could pluck in a political favorable court district, and you have the last nail in Amazon's coffin.
YOU are a responsible citizen, or should be. What's wrong with YOU keeping track of how much YOU buy at Amazon, and when tax time comes around YOU compute what sales tax YOU owe on YOUR purchases through Amazon, and submitting that tax to YOUR state when YOU pay your state income tax? That's how it is done in Nebraska, and that's how I did it six months ago, and I do my taxes on line.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
A big chunk of the Defense budget goes to HR.
Of 685.1 billion
$154.2 billion to Military Personnel
$3.1 billion to Military Housing
22.9%
$140.1 billion to Procurement
The VA gets an additional $54 billion outside of the DoD budget
Technically, California does have an Army, the California National Guard. Air Guard units would be their Air Force.
While those units are funded by the US DoD, unless Federalized, they answer to the Governor of California as Commander in Chief, not the President of the United States.
I think so many people haven't bothered even looking at a mail-order coupon in ages (blame the Innert00bs :^) that they've forgotten this.
And Amazon has been collecting sales tax on sales to states where they have a presence in the state since day one. What has changed is that states are defining what constitutes having a presence in the state as having a business relationship with businesses that have a presence in the state. Amazon's response to this is to dissolve those business relations when such laws are passed. Of course, if they had done this when New York first passed such a law, these other states might not have passed them. Amazon instead chose to fight New York's law in court, and, while they are still appealing it, they lost.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well, no. First, the $200M isn't just from Amazon, and the other affected e-tailers aren't all trying to take similar steps to eliminate their business nexus with California. Second, the revenue from Amazon would only be simply lost if the transactions still occur, and still go to Amazon: but that presupposes that the affiliate program had no value to Amazon whatsoever. That supposition is unreasonable.
So, considering the effect of the Amazon transactions, if we suppose instead that the affiliate program actually does drive business to Amazon that would otherwise not go to Amazon, then those transactions will either:
* Not happen, and the California residents who would have engaged in them will use the money for other purposes, some of which is likely to be subject at least to California sales tax (and some of which may be subject to other California taxes as well);
* Happen, but go to some other e-tailer, which may either already be subject to sales tax before the expansion (e.g., Barnes & Noble or any other e-tailer which also has a physical retail presence in the State) or may have a business nexus in the State that has not been severed (because, unlike Amazon, the e-tailer prefers to preserve sales even if it means paying tax on them.)
* Happen, but go to some brick-and-mortar retailer in the State, which is already subject to State sales tax.
The reason that intelligent policy works this way is that countercyclical government spending reduces the depth and severity of recessions, and the times when you need government doing more is when times are bad (when the private sector economy is doing well on its own, you want government doing less; when it isn't, you want government doing more.)
But, in any case that's not what is happening in California: while there are some revenue enhancements that are taking place in California, the budget gap has been closed largely by spending cuts (Gov. Brown's initial proposal was a half-cuts, half-revenue plan, but California requires a supermajority to pass tax increases or extensions and only a simple majority to pass a budget, so the actual budget passed has less, realistically, on the revenue side; in theory its about the same because instead of some of the tax extensions there are more favorable revenue forecasts on the revenue side, but those are probably overly optimistic and there are additional triggered spending cuts programmed mid-year if those revenue forecasts don't turn out to be right.)
Because, despite the fact that this is an article of faith among anti-tax Republicans, its not actually supported by facts. It is possible for a particular tax increase to be a net drain compared to a particular spending cut of the same magnitude, but whether or not it is depends on what the tax increase is and what the spending increase is. (For a government which can relatively freely borrow, a tax increase is probably usually a short-term economic drain compared to maintaining spending without increasing taxes, i.e. deficit spending, but both due to Constitutional requirements for a budget that is at least nominally balanced, and credit conditions resulting from California's fairly free borrowing during good economic conditions, Cali
How many of those 25k affiliates "forgot" to include their affiliate income?
Substantially less than the new number of affiliates, 0, which will no longer have affiliate income to tax, nor will be spending affiliate generated income in California.
That's right, even if eery single affiliate were not reporting taxes, California STILL would have been better off with that affiliate income entering the state.
How many people getting by on affiliate income will be forced to leave the state or go on state assistance now I wonder? I'll bet THAT answer is > 0...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
California has no right to place demands on a company that does not have a presence in California. What they have done is said that if you do certain types of business with companies in California, they are going to count that the same as having a presence in California. Amazon's response to that is to say, "Fine, we will discontinue such business relationships, effective immediately." So, Amazon is still not going to collect those taxes for California AND certain businesses in California will either have to move out of California, or lose a significant source of revenue. The net result of this law will be a reduction in the amount of tax revenue collected by the state of California.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Alright, the guy above you is a moron. You're a bigger moron. First, when you talk about "entitlement spending", at least in any meaningful way, you're talking about Social Security and Medicare. That's where numbers like "50% of the federal budget" come from. Not stuff like welfare, which is some piddling amount that probably doesn't even hit a whole percentage point.The "welfare leach with ten kids" if she even exists, is such a negligible portion of the federal budget that you can completely eliminate welfare and it will hardly matter at all to the budget discussion. It will hurt a lot of people, but it won't even come close to balancing the budget.
So, Social Security and Medicare. Two programs that have been promised to us all. Especially Social Security, which we all pay a special tax for our entire working lives, on the theory that once we reach retirement it might provide us with some gas money. Is it really surprising that anytime anyone talks about messing with them, everyone over the age of 50 gets a little excited? Ya see, that's the interesting thing. When we talk about entitlement programs, everyone is always excited to cut programs that assist the poor. Get rid of that shit, fuckers don't do anything anyway. Problem is, that rarely has much of any effect on the budget becasue those programs don't cost all that much. As soon as we start talking abut the big ticket items everyone is all "Don't touch *my* Medicare."
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Wow sounds like someone got up on the wrong side of the stimulus. This is chicken little all over again. Several states have passed these laws and the sellers continue to make money and the sky did not fall. There is no double dip; we do not have to pay 200,00% for my 100 jobs. 11 years ago there was a budgetary surplus. – Remember they sent everyone a check. – This surplus was achieved through raising taxes and cutting spending. The government is not the enemy. They are the immigrant workers we let deal with the shit jobs we are not willing to go out and do for ourselves. Oh but they mostly get paid better, have health plans, and get a pension.
However, I think that the REAL story here, and the one everyone is missing, is that in reality, Amazon is just looking for any excuse to dump their affiliates without having to take the bad publicity.
That is bullshit. The reason Amazon has grown so large is BECAUSE OF affiliates and the long-tail traffic they generate. The next to last thing Amazon wants to do is to lose affiliates, with the last thing being collecting taxes THEY are not really responsible for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
California props up the federal government and the defense budget by paying out more than it receives.
Not out of the state budget. I am pretty sure that there is little or no money in the state budget that is being sent to the federal government. When discussing balancing a state budget, the amount of federal spending in a state vs the amount of federal taxes collected in the state is irrelevant.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
As a general rule, I find that conservatives and libertarians have a few simple articles of faith about tax policy, regulation, etc., rather than thinking about the consequences.
I've encountered people who really analyze the situation in which the policy is proposed and the specific policy and think about the consequences, but in my experience they've been more often liberals than libertarians or conservatives, and the ones that I wouldn't normally call liberals are very much not libertarians and far to the left of the modern Republican Party, and so would probably be considered "liberal" in today's political landscape.
Well, that's not entirely true. There are plenty of people advocating policies in line with the modern Republican party that deeply and carefully consider the impacts of policy on a particular corporation or industry (though this is rarely reflected in their public characterization of the policy!), rather than the social harms or benefits, but they are mostly corporate lobbyists who represent the interests of a particular firm or industry.
The law requires that they must collect taxes if they or a subsidiary are in California.
Amazon has two research labs in CA, the first does work on searches the second did the design work on the Kindle and is rumored to be working the new Kindle and the upcoming Android based tablet.
So Amazon may be willing to not fight for the associate program but will probably fight to kill the law to protect themselves and keep theses two subsidiaries.
Socialist!
Oh, you mean this law was written just for Amazon, and doesn't apply to every other business selling on the internet?
My little indie t-shirt and jewelry making friends in oth states will be glad to hear that we're writing one-business-only laws now.
"The local mom & pop" have to deal with ONE tax rate. California has 1700 separate tax jurisdictions.
And for all the other businesses out there, it's not even collecting the taxes that's the hard part, it's FILING, quarterly, in every state where you make a sale. The paperwork nightmares for small businesses would, I think, be enough to shut a lot of them down.
If you are comparing a B&M (a la Best Buy for example) to a mail retailer these are not the same beast. There may not be a store in every county of every state. A mail based retailer would need to be responsible for tax code in ALL counties/states/municipalities. A B&M only needs to be aware of the tax code where they have a presence.
Lots of big retailers who have a physical presence in many states and also have online retail outlets (JCPenney, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Lowes, and etc.) manage to collect taxes that vary zip code. I worked for one such company and they subscribed to a service that provided the information for them. It was a simple look up during the checkout process to determine the appropriate sales tax rate. The company downloaded the latest tax rates nightly. I'm sure Amazon could implement this relatively easily.
The federal government is playing the same games since they are out of money (which is funny when you think that they are the ones with a printing press),
Long ago, foreign gov'ts said "we are not sure we want to keep buying your treasuries... we see you have printing presses behind your back." So the U.S. invented Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (or TIPS), so they could continue digging a deeper hole.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to pay taxes on my shipped deliveries, but I don't understand why the states just don't arrange the Use Taxes to be collected by collecting a fee on every retail delivery in their state. You couldn't just apply it on out of state shippers, as it would violate the interstate commerce clause. Have it be a flat fee per delivery and if the package is insured, a percentage of the package's insured value. If the package is valuable enough to be insured, they could collect a little more on the delivery of the item. They could then just collect the revenue from the delivery service, who will just pass the increased cost back to the shipper.
Sorry, spending by the legislature is not CA's problem. Actually, there are many interrelated problems, many of which are a result of Prop 13.
1. Property taxes, which are a generally stable source of income are limited to the point of insignificance. This was sold as a way to protect grandma, but the real beneficiaries are big corps like chevron who are still sitting on the same land they were when it passed. Because property taxes cannot be touched, we have to rely on income and sales taxes, which are inherently unstable and obviously tank when you need them most.
2. Ballot box budgeting, has tied the hands of our legislature for quite some time. We keep passing laws specifying where and how much money must be spent, but without any regard to where the money comes from or to whether there is, in fact, any money to spend.
3. Prop 13 also raised the bar on tax increases to the point where it is virtually impossible to raise taxes at all. It used to be, if the budget stayed within 5% of the previous year's budget, it could be passed with a majority vote. If the budget grew or shrank too much, a super majority was needed. This seems quite logical and effective to me.
4. We pass stupid laws that dramatically increase our prison population without considering the financial impact of housing them.
There are many reasons why CA is in the shape that it is in. Raising taxes and cutting spending are only stop gap measures for what is really needed. The only way CA is going to get out of the shape it's in is to hold a Constitutional Convention. We need to gut and rewrite it in such a way as to be fair, effective and quite a bit more strict as to how it is modified.
CA might as well give up and become part of Mexico already.
An idea: Since Texas theoretically can secede from the union, then why can't the union secede California? It certainly would eliminate a huge lability, and thanks to natural landscape there are already pretty good border controls in place. Then when the state collapses under its own weight, the federal government and by extension the rest of us do not have to suffer for California's egregiously bad choices.
Sure we'd lose some major ports, but you could simply dig a shipping channel from the ocean out to Nevada somewhere. I mean, what's California going to do to stop you?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can summarize most of the comments as either 'California is dumb, they are losing revenue' or 'Amazon is a dirty cheat,' but neither of these (whether or not they're true) address the real problem, which is that our sales tax structure, which worked reasonably well when mail order was largely a complementary system to 'going out shopping,' doesn't work well at all when there are large groups of people for whom the majority of their shopping is done online and out of state -- but the solution here is not to simply say 'you must collect sales tax for everybody no matter where they are.' Amazon might be able to do this, but a small business never could. The burden of calculating the sales tax is bad enough (as you can't just plug in a zip code - it varies by municipality in many places) but the burden of actually remitting that tax to each and every state and local government is tremendous. This is why Amazon and other online retailers fight this stuff, because they just pass the actual tax itself on to you, the customer -- but their expense in the vast amounts of paperwork involved is considerable, particularly when their business model is built on streamlining things like this. Big box stores already have the mechanism in place to do this for each state where they operate (so it's quite understandable that they'd be peeved about somebody not having to do it...)
Some people suggest a federal VAT to replace state sales tax, but that's not the answer simply because the federal government can't tell the state governments that they can't have a tax. They can have a Federal VAT, sure, but there's no way to enforce the 'instead of' provision in the US that I'm aware of. I think the solution here is simply some technical genius. Get somebody like Google to work with the credit card companies and establish a tax clearinghouse that any merchant can plug in to, and then anybody who collects money online can take advantage of their existing ecommerce infrastructure to both calculate and deliver the correct amount of tax to the clearinghouse, which then tags it with the EIN of the employer and sends it directly to the state and/or local government, each of which would pay a small percentage or else a flat fee based on their size to run the clearinghouse. The added burden on the small business is minimal, though laws would have to be changed because you usually have to go through a process to collect sales tax for each state; they'd need to eliminate this for anybody using the online clearinghouse. But it can be done.
Instead, we'll just have the same discussion over and over again every time a state government tries to collect tax from the Amazons of the world. I don't blame Amazon, though. I think they're legally correct -- the idea of having a subsidiary company that has got nothing to do with the actual selling making you responsible for the sales tax is a stretch. But tax reform isn't sexy, and is unlikely enough in an off year - much less when an election year is right around the corner.
>>Highly polarized, closed-minded, hating opposing
>>viewpoints with generalities, getting nothing done.
>>Congratulations.
That is exactly how your post sounds.
If the economy is so bad, why are stock indexes back to prerecession levels?
I can guess three reasons:
First, companies traded on U.S. exchanges are making profits on offshore work. Offshoring doesn't show up in gross domestic product work performed outside the United States, and employment on foreign soil produce earnings for a company but not individual income tax revenue.
Second, companies traded on U.S. exchanges are making profits on efficiency. In a lot of cases, automation has allowed one worker to do the job that five would have done before. The workers made redundant by more efficient methods of production produce earnings for a company but not individual income tax revenue.
Third, U.S. stock indexes are in units of U.S. dollars. If the Consumer Price Index now (for example) is greater than the prerecession Consumer Price Index, then the dollar has become less valuable, and operagost has a point. In fact, according to BLS tables, the amount of money needed to buy one CPI basket has risen 8.7% over the past four years (2.1% APR of inflation), from $207.949 in May 2007 to $225.964 in May 2011.
They should have done what Ireland does. Charge duty on the postage and the postal companies can't deliver until the duty is paid or the goods go back and the consumer can argue it out with the website they bought off of for a refund or pay for the items to be resent and pay duty next time.
Might be easier on an island though since everything has to come through one of a few ports.
As you said, tradition.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Apple & Barnes have brick-and-mortar stores. When you order online they use the tax rates of the store in your state nearest to your ordering location, as if you had driven to that store and made the purchase. A simple solution that Amazon cannot use because it doesn't have retail outlets. Amazon is playing around with online grocery shopping. I suspect that they will abandon that experiment after they look at all the tax collection requirements that would arise if they had local grocery warehouses that they shipped from. Or, that they limit their grocery sales to dry and canned goods only that do not require refrigeration.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Parent makes an important point. To push it a little further, this new law is not so much about paying sales taxes (which purchasers are already obligated to do), but a question about what a state government can force an out-of-state entity to do (here, collect sales taxes on its behalf). New York state has gotten into hot water over a related issue before, when it effectively forbade out-of-state companies from shipping alcohol into the state. The discussion on the current law shouldn't be whether the sales taxes are justified or not, but rather the limits to what a state can compel an out-of-state entity to do.
Note also that this isn't a private outsourcing issue. California, recognizing that it is difficult to collect taxes accurately, isn't trying to pay someone to collect taxes on its behalf. It is trying to compel an out-of-state entity to do it. Yes, it already compels in-state entities to do so, and these in-state entities ostensibly benefit from other California services. One way of looking at this question then might be, does out-of-state Amazon sufficiently benefit from California services to justify compelling it to perform a state revenue function?
Specifically, one of the EU treaties means that member states will not double-dip when it comes to VAT[1]. When you import something into an EU member, you must pay VAT, unless VAT has already been paid in another EU member. One of the side effects of the same treaty is that members of the EU may not lower the VAT rate without the consent of other members. This works fine, as long as trade is roughly balanced. People in Germany buying things in France pay VAT to the French government, but as long as French people are spending roughly the same amount on goods where VAT is charged in Germany, it all evens out. Some places, like the channel islands, act as havens with lower VAT rates, but typically there isn't much flow of money caused by this.
This would be a problem for the USA, because there are large differences in the economies different states and because tax rates vary. In the EU, VAT is 15-25% everywhere, and within 18-22% in most places, so there's not a huge incentive to buy from a different VAT rated area, unless you're buying a lot or live right next to a border. In the USA, sales taxes are imposed by both states and cities and vary from 0% to over 15% (counting state and city taxes together), so there is a much larger incentive to buy from somewhere with a lower tax rate.
[1] Value added tax - similar to a sales tax. Each company charges n% on their sale price and claims back n% of their purchase price, meaning that they end up paying tax on the price difference (i.e. the value added).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How could the number of "forgetful" affiliates be less than zero, let alone subsatntially less?
There is nothing braver than amazon sticking to their fine ethic principles. Those politicians raising taxes should get a real job.
Many large retailers that have a physical presence in many states and also operate online retail outlets seem to have no problem determining the tax rate for the person purchasing something online. One large retailer I did some work for subscribed to a service that tracked all the changes in tax rates and provided a look up table to the retailer. For the retailer it was a simple look up during checkout to determine the correct rate for the purchase. Amazon could do the same thing.
How about eliminate the sales tax entirely and just focus on the income tax then? Local businesses will then be able to compete better with the internet and revenue will still increase without targeting those who need to spend a greater % of their earnings to survive.
One of the reasons California is already in big trouble financially is that they depended too much on income tax rather than other sources of revenue. Income taxes are highly variable. When the economy tanked, income tax revenue went way down. We also have much lower property tax revenues than a lot of other states, due to Prop 13. A pretty sane thing to do right now would actually be to change Prop 13 so that it doesn't apply to businesses. The original reason people voted for Prop 13 was that they felt sorry for old folks who couldn't pay the property taxes on their houses. But as a side-effect, Disneyland pays property taxes based on a 1978 valuation of their property in Anaheim.
Find free books.
And if you buy your Apple computer from Amazon.com then they do not charge sales tax. Advantage to Amazon.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I am not aware of all of California's taxes (in NJ our income/property taxes are reversed from yours it seems). Sales taxes tank too in economic downturns but the way to recover the economy isn't by getting stricter on sales tax that's for sure. If property taxes are that lowthen yeah raise those instead of income.
First--you're missing the entire point.
CA isn't trying to collect sales taxes because they know they're not entitled to any. They're trying to use Amazon as their agent to collect USE taxes, which the residents of the state of CA owe--but aren't paying.
It's not Amazon's job to collect use taxes for the State of CA. It's not their job to collect income taxes for CA residents or Board of Equalization payments for B&M stores in CA either.
The state of CA knows they're not owed any sales taxes from out-of-state vendors. That's why they're trying to use them to collect use taxes. The "affiliate" issue is a red herring. It provides no justification for any of it.
Second--your argument is circular.
You assume that taxes are owed, and that by not collecting them, the state grants an advantage. Then conclude taxes are owed on the basis that an advantage was granted. Which only works if you first assume that taxes are owed. This is called assuming the consequent.
Walmart manages to handle all these rules online. I'm sure Amazon can too.
Calculus
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, do the opposite. Scrap the income tax and implement a consumption (sales) tax. Who cares how much you make. Tax on what you spend, because what you spend things on impacts what government resources are needed to support it. How much money you have in the bank has zero impact on society. But the cars you drive, food you consume, house(s) you live in, etc. all those impact everyone.
And now it's being used to force citizens to subsidize big business like agriculture and insurance, effectively prohibiting self sufficiency
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
How could the number of "forgetful" affiliates be less than zero
I didn't say it was less than zero. I was saying it might be as many as all of them, but that doesn't matter to still have a negative impact on California finances from the law.
Still not sure where you got "less than zero" from any part of my message...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well the Feds taking their 40% cut off the top doesn't really help CA's tax base?
No. Never. Then we citizens would see the true tax rate in one simple number, which might cause some sort of organized revolt (I seriously doubt it, myself; revolutions are inconvenient, and Americans dislike being inconvenienced more than anything else). I don't know if there is even a point to Amazon fighting this. Even though I think this violates the Interstate Commerce Clause and most of the court precedents related to it, I can't see the Federal Government getting in the way of any state and "their money". The main things the modern Federal court system will trample on anyone and everyone, and their apparent rights for are - protecting and growing Federal power and money, and protecting and growing State power and money (except when it conflicts with Federal power, which is not the case here).
The only people that support replacing all taxes with consumption taxes are wealthy members of the investor class who would have their tax burdens virtually eliminated by consumption only taxes and misinformed people who don't understand that they would be fucked by such a scheme.
Which category do you belong to?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
It's worth noting that the Supreme Court's Quill decision in 1992, while upholding the Bella Hess (1967) physical presence test, did so not on the basis that physical presence was inherently Constitutionally mandatory (indeed, it took the unusual step of specifically noting that it was likely that, had the issue been one of first impression in 1992, the decision would have been different) but that the combination of the value of maintaining precedent and having a bright-line rule, in the circumstances actually present at the time, outweighed the benefits from adopting a more flexible approach to determining whether a sufficient nexus existed to allow a state to collect sales and use taxes on a transaction. Add to that that "on-line affiliates", the nexus used in many of the recent state taxes on online merchants, are not a kind of nexus that existed at the time of Bella Hess, or even Quill, and its quite easy to see the Court today not applying a strict physical presence test, and either applying alternate nexus criteria that would include on-line affiliates or simplying overruling the physical presence test altogether.
Oddly, this may be even more true given the heavily conservative makeup of the current Supreme Court, because the conservative justices on the Court tend both to favor state (as opposed to federal) power and to read the federal powers (including the negative ones at issue here) in the Commerce Clause narrowly.
I find this discussion interesting. Amazon seems to be taking the position that having to collect and pay state taxes will somehow destroy their business. Why then do they seem to be doing ok in Canada. Here, if you purchase something from Amazon.ca you will have to pay GST, PST or HST.
Untrue. The reasons that California is in big trouble financially are fourfold:
As far as I'm concerned, income tax should be the only tax allowed by law. It's the only non-regressive tax scheme that exists. Every other tax disproportionately impacts the poor. The poor spend a larger percentage of their income on products and housing than the rich, which means that sales tax and property tax impact them more (either directly or through higher rent). Same goes for taxes on businesses, as those businesses pass on those higher taxes to customers.
Income tax, by contrast, taxes based on income, which means that it affects rich and poor equally. If we eliminated the capital gains tax and replaced it with ordinary income, we would immediately fix all of our budget problems, both at the state and national level. If we eliminated the social security tax cap, we would fix social security's budget problems. Basically, everything wrong with our state and federal budget can be neatly pinned on tax shelters for the wealthy. In short, we're not relying on income tax too much. We're not relying on it nearly enough.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I don't know where you'd get the tax area data, but I'm betting the government either already has it or could make it fairly quickly.
You might be able to get such information, but in my experience, it will probably cost thousands of dollars every time you want to update the information. Most likely you will have to dedicate yourself to reading all the laws passed by the state, city, district, county, etc., and they won't be sorted in any useful way, and you cannot skip over bills like a county "celebrate flowers with a smile day", because there are often attachments unrelated to the main bill that could affect taxes. Most states don't give away this highly secret information, such as what tax rates are, for free.
Also, you need to know what products are non-taxable. Some places don't put a tax on certain types of food. Then there are those that add tax to "unhealthy" foods, which could mean anything from candy to MDonalds.
Just try to get a list of 5-digit zipcodes/city names from the post office so you can do some simple validations on data entry. I believe that list starts at around $3000, must be updated quarterly, and you cannot resell it as part of your software.
If a state wants to set up these taxes, they should be required to supply the software, for free, that will calulate the tax rate for a given shipping address. Any mistakes that the program makes are NOT the users responsibility. And it must NOT be limited to Windows only.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
2 billion $ for airconditioning tents!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
On the California Form 540, tax-payers are already required to report purchases from online retailers for which they (the taxpayer) has not already paid sales tax. The sales tax then gets collected on tax day instead of at the time of purchase. As a California resident, I'm very much against any additional taxes at this time (especially ones that seeming place an undue burden on flourishing business), but is this new law actually imposing any new tax that isn't collected already?
if ($question !~ m/bb|[^b]{2}/i) { die(); }
its not about creating jobs, it is about doing something worthwhile. doing something that creates wealth. military spending rarely creates wealth.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Sounds like you're in the category along with 40+% of the rest of the US that doesn't even pay Federal Income Tax. Congratulations. I will gladly continue to pay your "fair share" of the social resources you consume. Because that's what Freedom is all about.
Go ahead, and write one for California. Just remember that there are 57 other states to worry about (according to the president), as well as territories, protectorates, etc. and that the tax laws are constantly being changed by whatever political party happens to be in office.
Walmart doesn't have as big a problem as Amazon would, because they only have to worry about the spot there store is planted on. Once they determine what is taxable at what rates, it's not too bad. However, Amazon is required to charge taxes based on where the customer is located.
Make sure you determine what items are taxed at differeing rates based on their UPC, if it happens to have a UPC, or description if it doesn't. You will need to know such things like are tomatoes considered fruits or vegetables, because a minimum wage clerk won't. A data entry for tax status for each product won't work, because the clerk won't know how to fill it out correctly most of the time, and Amazon orders don't use clerks.
Enjoy determining what tax entity the customer is located in, because it isn't baed on zip codes. Someone on the west side of a street might be in one tax authority, while the other side of the street will be in another. If you make any mistakes in your determinations, you will be charged with numerous tax offenses and sent to prison.
Come back to us within an hour with your simple program that handles all that correctly, since it's such an easy problem.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Ok, I admit I got that one backwards - should read:
How many of those 25k affiliates did not "forget" to include their affiliate income?
Substantially greater than the new number of affiliates, 0, which will no longer have affiliate income to tax
Thank you for debugging my text. E.B. White would probably still whack me over the head for it, but it;s good enough for now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You also ignore the fact that four years of productivity and growth has vaporized, probably never to catch up again. That means we're all poorer.
Greece has very high tax rates and no GDP growth. It's done. So will we if we don't cut spending and taxes.
I think so many people haven't bothered even looking at a mail-order coupon in ages (blame the Innert00bs :^) that they've forgotten this.
This case in particular is an example of policy needing to evolve to accommodate a massive change in the way people consume. The bottom line is that California sorely needs money and Amazon is helping to deplete their tax revenue by competing against California business on a scale that mail-order never could. Arguing about technicalities like the affiliate program is not helping anybody in this case, either the consumer or web site owners. It amounts to a weak legal ploy to try to trap Amazon into paying sales taxes and it hurts California business even more because website owners can no longer make use of Amazon's affiliate program.
It's a more difficult case to make, but California ought to pass a law, saying, if you want to do business in this state, you need to pay our sales tax, and then let it go to the supreme court. A strong case could be made that a website is no different than 'brick and mortar' in today's world.
Say what will about Liberals vs Conservatives, Democrats vs Republics, that isn't the issue here. The issue is whether or not California, a state, has the right to collect sales tax from an entity that, legal speaking, isn't selling there. SCOTUS has pretty clearly said that it doesn't have this right. Now, in an effort to raise revenues, California has tried to tax them anyway. Why? Because many of the roughly 25 thousand affiliates "forgot" to include their affiliate income. California would like to have this money and the online retailers are easier to come after than all of those affiliates. Frankly this isn't Amazon's problem, at least so far as California is concerned. California is trying to control interstate commerce. And as much as I don't like the over application of the commerce clause, this is EXACTLY why it's part of the constituation.
Incorrect.
The people who bought those goods, will still buy those goods. Just from someone who isn't breaking the law.
Of course, this is a massive bluff by Amazon. There is no way they will pass up on a market as large as CA.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Cheat the moderation system - here's how they downmod others, and this is where countertrolling explains what he's doing while he trolls others (to his fellow trolltalk.com friends):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2245866&cid=36491652
And, here's where countertrolling's "troll mechanics" for downmodding others is explained in detail by someone that got sick of it happening:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2271908&cid=36579618
As far as bogus up moderations, the trolltalk.com bunch (tomhudson, countertrolling, & others) collectively "team up" to upmod one another, in teams, as favors to one another.
(Talk about low, and bogus!)
---
In fact, here's what he says about it, why he does it, and to all of us here:
"What the skiddies here don't understand is that I don't give a shit about dumbass 'karma' on the internet.. I'm here for the jollies with nothing to lose or fight for.. watching them destroy their world.. They can go absolutely nuts as far as I'm concerned.. It's nothing but pure entertainment (and data points) for me and mine... Tragicomedy is probably the best word I can think of to describe it" - by countertrolling (1585477) on Thursday June 30, @10:26AM (#36622502) Journal
QUOTED VERBATIM FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2281808&cid=36622502
Sounds like a sick individual to me.
They can still SELL in CA, they are just dropping their affiliates like a used rubber. Good one CA lawmakers! That will boost the economy.
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They lost in New York State court, which is pretty meaningless. "State court upholds state law against out of state company, film at 11"
NewEgg, on the other hand, simply stopped complying. Presumably the idea was to require NYS to go after them in Federal court.
There is no way they will pass up on a market as large as CA.
AIUI they aren't planning to give up on CA completely they are just planning to supply them entirely from out of state.
Is it worth screwing their affiliates to maintain their unfair advantage over B&M retailers? Does anyone have any actual stats for how much amazon makes out of their affiliates VS how much they make from selling stuff themselves?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Cutting welfare is something I don't think is a good idea, but I wanted to correct your numbers. According to this welfare is $700b, 11% of total spending, making it the 5th largest category, behind Health Care, Pensions, Education, Defense.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Walmart does need to worry about exactly the same things as Amazon, because they sell online. As does Target, Sears, and more stores than I care to name. Since they have a physical presence in every state, they have to collect taxes from online sales. Since they do not (yet) have a location in every possible taxable locality, they must figure out, based on your location not the store's location, what to tax you. It's exactly the same situation as Amazon. Yet they make it work. Walmart doesn't send out a delivery truck from the local store when you order from walmart.com, they ship you a product, just like Amazon. That product could be almost anything, just like Amazon. They have to charge you taxes based on your delivery locality, just like Amazon (would have to if it paid any sales taxes).
I didn't say I could write this in an hour, or even a day. Obviously it's a complicated problem. Actually the harder part is just the huge amounts of data entry. The algorithms themselves, while somewhat complicated, could be hashed out in a few weeks by a competent group of programmers and a good DBA I'm sure. Which, I believe, was the time frame and team size I mentioned in my first post. All of which assumes that there isn't, as I suggested earlier, an off the shelf product or service willing to handle the details for you. Give the number of companies that likely need this stuff, it wouldn't surprise me.
Determining locality based on zip code and street address is pretty trivial by the way, there's databases of that stuff already. You ever notice that when you go to the post office or the UPS store they ask you for street address and zip? They figure out town and state from that.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
So all those "Not sold in stores - 97 cent shipping to home" products on walmart's site are just an optical illusion? Wow ...
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Just try to get a list of 5-digit zipcodes/city names from the post office so you can do some simple validations on data entry. I believe that list starts at around $3000, must be updated quarterly, and you cannot resell it as part of your software
You're getting ZIP code data from the wrong place for starters. I can get it from ESRI for the (already paid) cost of my GIS software license.
There is a war going on for your mind.
California sorely needs money because the denizens of the statehouse are completely corrupt, and made horrible, unsustainable deals with other governmental entities. They can do it because the world is full of people who would happily opine that ever more money be shoveled into the bottomless pit.
Service companies that sell parts to customers have been keeping track of state taxes for decades. Hell, some websites even ask the county you live in if your zip code spans multiple tax jurisdictions.
Not being able to keep track of sales tax rates is not a problem. Computers are great at keeping track of numbers and Amazon has plenty of those.
"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet"
This is an interesting site. I wish it were able to give charts for previous years but it doesn't seem to. You are correct that I severely underestimated how large welfare currently is (and to an extent I was exaggerating to begin with), but it does seem that Welfare expenses have grown considerably since 2006, where it appears to have been a mush smaller percentage of the budget (still not quite as small as I was saying, but in the 3-5% range). I think it's safe to say that Welfare is so large right now becasue so many people are still out of work from the recession.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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Okay everyone. Let's get some perspective here. These Amazon Affiliates we are talking about are California based businesses. When they sell directly to Californians they are required to pay a sales tax. Regardless of what you think about sales taxes they are established law. These local businesses are simply using the Amazon website as their online store. This new law will make it so that they still have to pay the same damn sales tax when they sell to Californians. This absolutely was a loophole that was giving some California businesses a big price advantage over other California businesses when selling to Californians. The only part about this that isn't in California is the Amazon servers that provide the online selling service for these California businesses (though there is a good chance that the servers are here too!). There is no injustice here. There is no radical new tax here. There is only a bunch of local California businesses using Amazon to avoid paying sales taxes when they sell products to Californians.
I'm am shocked I have seen no posts in this discussion criticizing Amazon for being such dicks. Surely they have a presence in some state in the US, and surely they pay sales taxes there, so it's not like they lack the ability to charge taxes. I see this as a big online retailer deciding to boycott my state because... well for no good reason.
-- QED
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Amazon is also excellent for used items now that there seems to be some control in place for shipping costs. I was able to find two hard to find Discworld books via a UK reseller that worked through amazon. You walk into local brick and mortar stores and ask a question, and you get glazed eyes stares like you're a blue alien speaking the Asari language.
And local stores are the only time I have had anyone tell me that the reason they no longer carry item X is because every time they get a new shipment of X it sells out right away. Read that again. I am not making that up, and I have been told that of four independent occasions. All four of those stores are gone now, BTW.
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Circuit City is a prime example when they fired all the experienced staff and hired no nothing warm bodies. I went in just to test, and asked about the LED based DLP televisions versus ones with the bulbs. Did they sell the bulbs for a decent price? Maybe a discount pack that would last the estimated life of the set? Blanks stares all around.
There was always a certain amount of display items not working, but it really went into the toilet after that. Nothing worked. The one near my house literally had TVs that looked like they were adjusted by blind people who could vaguely feel colors through some synesthesia effect. No surprise at all when they closed up.
>>Nebraska's constitution requires a balanced budget and the legislature is forbidden to spend more than the tax revenues take in
Technically, we have the same sort of thing here in California, but when your legislators ignore the law and nobody calls them on it, what can you do? Though the state controller has been stepping up a little more this year, I guess.
I completely agree that it's an unfair burden for Amazon to figure out the taxes for the customers.
This is the Slashdot Collective, remember. Any attempt by any entity anywhere to make money is evil and greedy. We should all be out there washing the feet of homeless drug addicts, or something.
This has been visited before in the US Supreme Court regarding mail order purchases and I would imagine that any subsequent challenge will involve that previous decision quite heavily since there's little difference in application. California has no right to force a seller from outside the state to collect THEIR taxes. They already have a law to collect sales and use tax for out of state purchases.... why don't they enforce that one?
After reading a few comments, most of the people here don't understand this law very well. What California did is redefine what being located in California means to:
If California were more creative, they should have tried defining a nexus as anyone who uses a shipping service with warehouses and vehicle depots in the state of California. Fedex or UPS could not have pulled out as easily under this condition.
So, Amazon fired the California contractors. Now they aren't located in California any more. Stupid law gets equally mind numbing response. Amazon pulls out, and their affiliates, some of which are very large web publishers, will have to forgo participating in Amazon's affiliate program or will have to move out of California to protect their income from their Amazon affiliate programs.
What California did is try to make an end run on the US Constitution and a recent supreme court decision that said requiring out of state merchants to pay sales tax was an attempt to regulate intrastate commerce, a power that is exclusively delegated to the Federal Governement. The basic reason for this is to prevent trade wars between the states over tariffs, duties and exclusionary laws. Fortunately, California has inadvertently aimed it's cannon at it's own foot and fired a round of grapeshot: By attempting to regulate Amazon, California affiliates now will have to leave the state to continue doing business.
A lot of people seem to think somehow Amazon was ducking an obligation to pay sales tax. This is simply wrong. The buyer pays sales tax. The seller only acts as an agent in collecting it (in most states, the seller actually gets to keep a cut of the sales tax). The only way for Amazon to duck sales tax is to not pay sales tax on their taxable purchases.
Some people think that affiliates are not reporting their taxes. Some less intelligent affiliates my not report their income, but most will because Amazon reports your Affiliate income to the IRS, so if you fail to report your affiliate income, you are likely to get into trouble.
A few people see the mail order sales tax issue as one of being fair to local merchants. As it sits, mail order merchants in California can sell to every other state and protectorate without having to collect sales tax on those sales, just like an Indiana retailer doesn't have to collect sales tax for a sale shipped to California. It's actually pretty fair to everyone except huge companies that do have actual locations in every state.
-- $G
And who updates the data and who is responsible if the data is incorrect?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Sales tax laws are not only at the state level, but each county and city as well. When you build a B&M store, you know what tax jurisdiction that store is in. An online retailer doesn't have that luxury and has to know the nuances of thousands of different and constantly changing tax codes.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
to discover I was an Amazon Associate.
Well the Feds taking their 40% cut off the top doesn't really help CA's tax base?
Well now, be honest - the Feds only take 25% off the top, they borrow the other 15% and make CA responsible for it...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Walmart probably gets taxes as if it was bought in one of their in-state stores, since unlike Amazon, they do have a business presence.
I pay plenty of federal income tax, plus I pay property taxes and of course consumption taxes.
Fuck you.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
It's a more difficult case to make, but California ought to pass a law, saying, if you want to do business in this state, you need to pay our sales tax
I have a better idea. How about they keep their hands off the net before they make it as pathetic as the California public schools, roads, DMV, or anything else the California government controls
What is not ethical is amazon for avoiding paying sales tax; if they do business in the state (some of their associates do) then that is subject to sales tax. This is not an issue of taxes which contrary to what too many people think - TAXES MUST BE PAYED BY SOMEBODY and every cheater is raising your taxes.
CA can control any commerce in their state; in this case, they can't mess with the mail order catalogs from out of state but when they catalog for local businesses which resides INSIDE THEIR STATE, Amazon is providing tax evasion services (or money laundering) and CA has every right try to do something about it. I agree it is misguided to go directly after Amazon; however, it would not surprise me if CA finds some federal grounds to cause some trouble.
What SHOULD be done is a tax on shipping insurance for inbound shipping. Shipping companies reside inside the state so they can be taxed. Then amazon would probably insure themselves but there would be a minimum tax at least. Naturally, B2B freight would be exempt.
States continue to see their revenue decline as sales tax income goes down while LOCAL business makes less to tax because they are losing business to online stores from out of state (or out of country) who get an unfair advantage of being tax free. Let them have their benefit of not running a store but they should not get out of competing in a BALANCED marketplace.
I won't get into the green issues of buying local. There are plenty of economic reasons to buy local.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'm shocked to see it put so clearly and accurately. What are you doing here, didn't you realize this is a flame war? Facts and logic have no place here!
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Because then they'd have to collect state and muni taxes, and their price advantage would either become much less, or go negative.
They already collect state taxes in several states in which they have a presence (e.g. in Washington). Even so, they have no shortage of customers in those states.
All California is doing is saying "if you want to compete, compete on an even footing, and don't enable tax cheats." Is it a cash grab?
It's not a cash grab, but it places undue burden on online retailers. A local store does not need to care about numerous locations (remember, taxes can vary also on county level - it's not just one rate per state), but only the one where the store is physically located in.
The easiest way to not "enable tax cheats" is to come up with taxes which are easily enforceable. Use tax is not such a tax, and you can't really ditch the need for use tax by any sort of creative lawmaking so long as you have sales tax (note that Amazon is removing affiliates from California, but it will keep selling to California residents, so they will still cheat by not paying their use tax). On the other hand, income tax is fairly easy to enforce on residents of the state, regardless of where they spend their money.
Heck, I am a regular Amazon customer in a state where they do collect sales tax due to having a presence here, and I still buy from them largely because of lower prices.
America is one of the most tax light countries on the planet so stop whining - and Amazon, you can pay the vat all over europe so stop being greedy, you are making enough as it is.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
California needs money because, as is often said, a deficit is built into the state constitution. Much is decided through propositions, and guess what? People like to vote for services, but won't vote to pay for them (even though props are supposed to be budget neutral). The result is that they choke their public services to the point where they're largely ineffective (schools, jails, etc). Corruption is a different issue which can be resolved through campaign finance reform.
All of those problems can be resolved by more revenue. Except for the DMV, who are a bunch of useless, waste-of-space fuck-faces, schools and roads can't be efficiently operated by private enterprise (yeah, yeah, I've heard all the arguments). Sales tax alone is not the answer, but it would certainly help.
I don't know what California's sales tax system is like. I wonder if it has anything to do with the complexity of collecting the tax, and not the competition issue.
With so many tax localities, it would be nice if state governments were to create an option for online retailers to collect a special sales tax rate (based on a weighted average of what's collected), then remit the tax collected to the localities.
So, here in Washington state, let's say, hypothetically, that the weighted average is 8.9%. So the retailer would collect said rate, with a special tax code, then the state would divide it up amongst the localities based on a fairness formula. Just an idea.
I would hardly characterize a $200M/yr expanded application of sales tax in a budget that features over $10B/yr in spending cuts (with another $4B in triggered cuts if revenue doesn't meet expectations) as balancing the budget "on the backs of the tax payer alone".
The people who bought those goods, will still buy those goods.
Yes they will.
And instead of some of that sale going to a California resident thanks to the affiliate program, all of it will go to Amazon.
Many affiliates paid tax on that money.
All of the affiliates certainly spent that money, probably a lot of it in California.
Now do you start to see what was lost?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Pray tell, to what domestic use would you put depleted uranium, cordite, and lead?
The energy and human effort required to manipulate them would be better put to use creating new infrastructure.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
ESRI updates it & good luck holding anyone "responsible" for ZIP code data.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Where do the shipping companies get the money to pay the taxes from? This idea just shifts the government's burden to the shipping companies and increases the cost of collection, who then have to turn around and charge the shipper.
Which jurisdiction's tax rate gets used? The drop off location? Ultimately, it's a logistical problem for any non-local company to actual figure out whose tax rate to apply. There are no boundaries that can be derived from purchaser information to determine which tax rate to apply. They don't follow zip codes.There are addresses that span county lines. I guess you could let the purchaser choose.
Government = a big legalized ponzi scheme.
Actually, everything wrong with our state and federal budgets can be neatly pinned on overspending. The country ran just fine without an income tax before the governments decided to start spending everything they could and then some.
If it doesn't directly relate to national defense, national highways, or day to day governing, it's probably not the federal government's goddamned business and shouldn't be funded by the taxpayers. The same goes for the state level, but they have a little more leeway as to what's their business. Either way, entitlements aren't any government's job.
Oh, yeah, voters share the blame. Well, voters other than me. :-) I vote no on all bond measures. And no one I've voted for has been in a state office for over a decade. I can't blame them too much when it comes to elected offices, though. When you're given a ballot full of nothing but sociopaths and/or ideology-addled morons, what can they do?
The idiots here voted for a high speed rail that I warned everyone within earshot would be a boondoggle. Guess what? It's a boondoggle.
Hello, Unfortunately, Governor Brown has signed into law the bill that we emailed you about earlier today. As a result of this, contracts with all California residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program are terminated effective today, June 29, 2011. Those California residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com, Endless.com, MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.com. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned before today will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule. You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of California. If you are not currently a resident of California, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here. And if you relocate to another state in the near future please contact us for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program. To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to offer the Associates Program to California residents and will not affect your ability to purchase from Amazon.com, Endless.com, MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.com. We have enjoyed working with you and other California-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to California residents. As mentioned before, we are continuing to work on alternative ways to help California residents monetize their websites and we will be sure to contact you when these become available. Regards, The Amazon Associates Team