Amazon Pushes For National Internet Sales Tax

SonicSpike writes "The Governor of Tennessee struck a deal with Amazon.com to allow their operations to move to TN in exchange for Amazon.com not having to collect TN sales tax for the next 2 years. However the Governor noted in his press conference that he is working with Amazon.com to push the US federal government to impose a national Internet sales tax."

Comments

It's not a barrier it's an assistance

[realxmp]

Amazon doesn't care where the money goes, nor do they really care about the rate. A federal tax could quite easily be collected and kept by the states. The reason they want a federal pre-emption is simply the abundance of rules and regulations that must be obeyed for each different area's individual sales tax. For new enterprise, having to obey one set of rules for collection of sales tax nationwide would represent an amazing saving on accountants bills.

Again, on what basis an internet tax?

[argStyopa]

I know it's crazy to so much of the leftward-leaning slashdot crowd, but is it so crazy to ask WHY a tax would be justified before implementing ANOTHER method of the government intruding into the otherwise-private transactions between people?

(And please note: our elected representatives being too stupid for several decades to balance a checkbook and spend less than they have available ISN'T ipso facto a valid reason to take more money from the public.)

To lay it out clearly:
- in terms of hard infrastructure, everything has already been paid for. There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store. Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
- I don't see the government providing any specific security for internet transactions; there's no government-security function backing https, nor any other transaction security system with an official imprimatur. I'm fine with this, by the way, I'm just saying that one of the legitimate reasons we pay taxes is the security and stable society under which the transaction is able to occur. This isn't present, as far as I can tell, on the internet.
- sure there are some internet investigations going on but I see these as other issues - I don't see a lot of prosecutions for internet fraud (could just be my ignorance), certainly nothing to justify the massive amount of cash that would be garnered from a broadly-asserted internet sales tax.

In short, simply because the government needs money, and can take it, doesn't mean we need to tolerate it blithely like sheep.

That would be great if every state had a sales tax

[faedle]

Except there are states that don't. We like our "no sales tax" in Oregon. Screw you, Tennessee.