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Amazon To Pay Texas Sales Tax
An anonymous reader writes "The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Amazon.com will soon start collecting sales tax from buyers in state of Texas. 'Seattle-based Amazon, which had $34 billion in sales in 2010, has long opposed collecting taxes. That has drawn fire from state governments facing budget shortfalls and from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, who say online sellers essentially give customers an automatic discount when they don’t collect taxes. Combs has estimated the state loses $600 million a year from untaxed online sales. However, Amazon has recently begun making deals with a number of states to collect sales tax. Those deals have usually included a one- to three-year window exempting Amazon from sales tax collection.'"
How about stop spending more money than you have?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
it is a tax that is the burden of regular people and they don't really care if taxes are hard on working families.
Phsaw, sales taxes disproportionately affect the poor and middle class. Of course they are in favor of it. I mean, they talk all the time about lowering taxes, but the subtext is always that they want to lower taxes on rich people. Just look at things like the Fair Tax. Does it really take more than about 15 seconds of examination to tell that it is a huge increase in the tax burden on the poor, as well?
is all that is. As for Texas being against taxes, well, the state is about 24.6 billion or so in debt under the ever amusing "conservative" governor Perry. So make no mistake about it. Governor Perry is against taxes, but he seems to be OK with authorizing *spending* whether there's tax revenue to cover it or not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Indeed.
Republicans always love regressive taxation. They don't even mind the payroll tax that much since it's highly regressive (capping out means it applies on 100% of the income of the poor and middle class, but 10% or less of the income of the upper class).
We could fix the tax system by classifying ALL income as income and eliminating the "capital gains" cheating bullshit, and eliminating the payroll tax caps and simply making it apply to all wages. But that'd never fly, because it'd be fair to all instead of the regressive taxation the Republicans want.
Consider:
If you ONLY consider income tax, somewhere around 50% of people have "no tax liability." A whole fucking lot of them are the senile delinquent Tea Party followers who no longer work because they're retired; the rest are mostly stay-at-home parents.
If you add in payroll taxes, it drops to 18%.
If you add in sales taxes, it drops to around 10%.
If you add in the various FEES that Republicans like to pass (remember, fees are even MORE regressive as a percentage of income) - stuff like auto registration fees for instance - it's around 5%.
But the Republicans still insist on ranting about people who "don't pay taxes."
The cost of the IRS is and always has been a red herring. We each pay about $40 yearly to fund the IRS. Not even all of that will go away, as you still have to have somebody make sure taxes are being payed and a bunch of bean counters to manage a prebate. You either have to have each person continue to file yearly or you have to have the manpower to audit an individual business and examine records down to the per-transaction level. Either way, you aren't going to be saving all that much money.
Meanwhile, rich people spend a tiny fraction of their income on anything that would get touched by a consumption tax. If you think Romney's 14% tax burden is low now, wait until you realize that he probably only spent 10% of his income for the year, giving him an overall tax burden under a Fair Tax system of somewhere in the lower single digits. Now, to go back to raising the some number of tax dollars as before, like you mentioned: if Romney is going to pay less and the total value is going to stay the same, where do you think the money Romney won't be paying will come from? I'll give you a hint: the middle class.