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US Senate Passes Internet Tax Bill 69 To 27
schwit1 quotes The Washington Post: "The Senate aimed to help traditional retailers and financially strapped state and local governments Monday by passing a bill that would widely subject online shopping — for many a largely tax-free frontier — to state sales taxes. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 69 to 27, getting support from Republicans and Democrats alike."
schwit1 adds "Unfortunately online businesses could be in for a rude awakening when it comes to the law's interpretation." Passage in the House is not certain, and companies like eBay are lobbying to raise the minimum sales required to collect state sales tax to $10 million instead of $1 million per year.
Total Garbage. Just what I expect from the U.S. Government. Can't balance our budget, find more ways to tax consumers.
to collect state sales tax to $10 million instead of $1 million per year.
I predict that if the limit is raised to $10 million then companies will "outsource" sales to wholly owned subsidiaries. For example "Your order has been filled by Amazon West Houston INC"... which has sales below the threshold. At $1 million a year it would be debatable whether the large organisational overhead would be worthwhile for larger companies, but an $10 million it probably would be.
Traditional retailers want business? Change their service, train staff better, have more registers open, kick out the rabble who just hang out in stores and never buy stuff. Most of all lower prices. Even with shipping and sales taxes, I've bought quite a few items online far cheaper. It adds up. Time saved, gas saved, not desiring to punch a moron, or rude person. Despite our need to be around people, malls and shopping just sucks. It's not the same pleasant experience it used to be.
The web front end and credit card transactions are in Bermuda, but the shipments are from a warehouse in the states? Is the seller obligated to collect state taxes.
I for one am glad to see that congress can come together on such an important bill.
That orange line is ALL Bush era tax cuts, most of which went to the middle class. And by "most" I don't mean 51%. I mean over 80% of the Bush tax cuts went to the middle class.
Nice try though. I don't know why you're complaining. Obama already undid most of the Bush tax cuts for high earners anyway.
The US Constitution has not had any validity in some times - probably not since Wickard v. Filburn, and to a lesser extent Gibbons v. Ogden, which basically gave the Federal government unlimited authority to regulate anything and everything, including where you can go, and what you can do with your own land.
"Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce among the several states". Maybe you should actually read the Constitution before you spout off your talk radio style nonsense.
This may be a very rare thing indeed: The commerce clause being used as intended.
bipartisan effort working together to screw the common american. Major multinational corporations are entirely exempt from burdens like taxation, while wageslaves enjoy a cornucopia of arcane, recursive taxation. That some how we're not supposed to talk about class warfare, why we all make shit-tier pay, or what sand encrusted foreign clusterfuck our taxes are being shoveled into.
it leads me to believe Hollyoaks has it all wrong. That Tony Stark only runs around fixing problems he created in the first place. that Batman is just the billionaire boilerplate we've come to recognize as our perpetual prison industrial complex. That should a revolution ever befall this great nation it will start with a flaming Wal-Mart, and not stop until every mansion and chateau from marthas vinyard to kennebunkport is reduced to a smoldering pile of ash twisted wrought iron.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Some big online retailers charge you sales tax, some patchwork of others do. Currently, I have to dig back through receipts to report unpaid sales tax come April and it's a hassle. How about some of you stop your whining and accept that a tax code should be consistently applied.
congress has the purse strings
note the large increase in spending took place once the democrats took control of congress. It has nothing to do with the bush tax cuts.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Among the challenges of collecting sales tax is there are thousands of taxing jurisdictions. And often the boundaries don't correspond to any zipcode nor even a particular municipality. In addition, sales tax jurisdictions can and often do overlap - ie. city and county.
Even a state that doesn't levy a sales tax itself may allow local authorities to do so, such as some local Alaskan towns do.
To make matters worse, there are numerous categories and exceptions in what's taxable depending on what it is, the amount purchased, the location / manner in which it's sold (ie. food item purchased in a convenience store verses supermarket; consumed on premises or take-out) and when (tax holidays, etc).
And then there's the matter of filing dozens of state sales tax returns - some will expect filings every month, some quarterly, etc. And the time-frames will often differ, so one could find themselves filing sales tax forms practically every month or even more often depending on sales volume. And that's not even getting into dealing with compliance checks that states may perform at any time.
Bottom line is sales tax is far more challenging to collect than many realize. It's not 50 states, but rather thousands of taxing jurisdictions with numerous different rates, rules, exemptions, etc.
There is talk of simplifying the collection process for on-line retailers, which would lessen the burden, especially to small businesses.
I appreciate that this is an anonymous coward asking another anonymous coward, but you need to back up that 'over 80%' with an independently verifiable report. Can you? Seems like an unsupportable claim to me, even putting aside that the remainder of your claimed 80% is still too much tax to cut off the obscenely wealthy.
BTW, constitutionally, the Government can tax anything for any reason. The power of taxation is absolute. There are no constitutional questions here.
That's 100% wrong. There are specific types of taxes the Federal Government is allowed to implement, as specified by the Constitution. Read it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Brick and mortar pay state sales tax because they operate a business in that state. On-line retailers do not because they don't operate a business in that state. Where on-line retailers do operate in a state, they pay state sales tax.
Do some research before posting.
Yes, is true, but I think there is a bit of a loophole. If you set up a PayPal like system in the Cayman Islands, you could funnel money into it (your "bank") and then because taxation is from the point of purchase (buyer's address) not the point of delivery, you could bypass tax law by making all purchases through that location. Basically, purchase by proxy through a Cayman's web site. The caveat is whether you owe gift tax or if it considered an overseas purchase, but once again you're right back in the unpaid Use Tax problem they are attempting to fix.
Also the average tax jurisdictions is thought to be about 9800, though there is a highball number in the 19000s. The real problem is there are something like 120 changes a day on average according to a news report I saw on it. If you have the resources to track 9800 different jurisdictions and 120 changes a day without a major impact to your bottom line, well I commend you Wal-Mart, but most businesses don't.
Okay, let's make this fair and require the brick & mortar stores to do the same thing. If I live in Colorado and visit friends in California, I only want to pay Colorado's 2.9% tax (which would be sent directly to Colorado) and not California's 7.5% (California should get nothing since I don't live there). It's the exact same logic. Let the brick and mortar stores have to hire new employees specifically to deal with all the new paperwork involved.
You're forgetting every county and municipal sales tax there might be.
And let's not forget that each state classifies items differently, and sometimes in really ambiguous ways. Is bottled water considered 'food'? (and thus not taxed in some areas) What food items are considered 'ready to eat' and thus subjected to various 'snack' taxes?
When this came up years ago, there was a push for there to be one body per state responsible for sorting out all of the sales taxes (and to be the point of payment), so that it'd be closer to the problem you describe (although, you forgot DC and territories).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
GE paid zero corporate income taxes. ZERO. On a company that continuously reports record profits. They "offshore" most of their money so they don't even have to pay taxes on the interest they earn. Exxon Mobil plays the same games, but they're in an even better position because they receive subsidies from the government, so their taxes are actually negative (the government gives them money), on top of their record profits.
My guess is that the larger online retailers will have to start playing these games as well. Amazon for sure, will probably charge us (the buyer) taxes, and then offshore the income, so that those taxes never get to the states they should.
Therefore, Amazon will actually get more income from every product sold, and that money will go right into Bezo's pocket. Because he has lawyers and accountants to make that money vanish into his mansion(s), without ever reporting it to the government.
And if not, it's fairly easy to buy a few senators and congressmen and make the problem go away.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The US Constitution states quite clearly that all revenue and spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives. It doesn't matter how good or bad this bill is, having it introduced in the Senate is unconstitutional, and I predict that it will get shot down very, very fast when it reaches the House because regardless of how badly some of the Representatives want this, they're not about to let the Senate step on their own privileges.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The web front end and credit card transactions are in Bermuda, but the shipments are from a warehouse in the states? Is the seller obligated to collect state taxes.
No, but the customer will have fun time with US customs when the package arrives.
The package isn't going through customs; it was shipped from inside the U.S. That's the most likely problem with this scenario; they're going to consider the seller's address to be the warehouse, not the country where they're registered.
Anyway, sales and use taxes are a pretty bad idea no matter where or how they're implemented, and I hate to see them taking hold on the Internet, where they will inevitably go to pay for things which have absolutely no relationship to the commerce being taxed. For local public services, a flat property tax is the only one that make any sense. (Not that I'm prepared to endorse any tax, but it's better than any of the alternative taxes.) The only real advantage sales taxes—but not use taxes—have is that they're very easy to collect, at least in a brick-and-mortar context. That doesn't generalize to online sales, so it's best to just forget about sales and use taxes entirely (for both local and online merchants) and find a different source of funds for local services which is actually tied to the use of those services.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat