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.'"

Comments

A red state raising taxes!!??!!!???

[plopez]

What! I thought they were all against job killing taxes!

Re:A red state raising taxes!!??!!!???

[Dan667]

it is a tax that is the burden of regular people and they don't really care if taxes are hard on working families.

Re:A red state raising taxes!!??!!!???

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:A red state raising taxes!!??!!!???

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Location based?

[dodgerfan]

Nope, just the shipping address.

Re:Note to all governments

[Surt]

Deficit spending is clearly the right strategy some of the time. Particularly if you spend your deficit on infrastructure that grows the economy and results in increased wealth to pay back that debt. The real problem comes when you spend that debt on ephemera like elder health care that gets you nothing but additional expenses.