Supreme Court Set To Hear Landmark Online Sales Tax Case (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could at least somewhat clarify Donald Trump's complaints about Amazon "not paying internet taxes." It will also decide if those cheap deals on NewEgg are going to be less of a steal. The case concerns the state of South Dakota versus online retailers Wayfront, NewEgg, and Overstock.com in a battle over whether or not state sales tax should apply to all online transactions in the U.S., regardless of where the customer or retailer is located. It promises to have an impact on the internet's competition with brick-and-mortar retailers, as well as continue to address the ongoing legal questions surrounding real-world borders in the borderless world of online.

Comments

How about NO sales tax?

[Ichijo]

Regressive taxes ought to be illegal anyway. There's really no good reason for them to exist, only bad ones.

Re:How about NO sales tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, the government confiscates my money (property) and I can't do anything about it.... I would argue we get a tax bill Jan 1 and its due April 15.

People would be furious at how much money goes to government instead of it being confiscated from their paycheck. Guarantee taxes would be lower if people had to write a check to the government every year. Its nothing more than wealth redistribution anyway.

Re:How about NO sales tax?

[BitterOak]

Welcome to the rest of the developed world where we have pay-as-you-earn (PAYE). It's utterly stupid to make people do their own taxes if they're on wages/salary - It's one of the first things commercial computers were designed to do for us - payroll.

And computers do do that. That's why taxes are withheld from your paycheck. But your employer can't possibly know about all your deductions or other income so the withholdings are sort of a guess. That's why you have to file taxes: so the exact amount of taxes can be calculated, and you either receive a refund or pay depending on whether your employer's computers over or underestimated your taxes. Think about it: how can your employer know about your earnings on investments or part-time work or about your real estate depreciation deductions, etc., etc. Would you even want your employer to know all that stuff? That's why people are responsible for doing their own taxes.

Re:How about NO sales tax?

[tippen]

Exactly. If you really want to change the way people see taxes and the cost of government services, stop taking taxes out of everyone's paycheck before they get them and make them write a check each month.

It would be amazing the shift in public opinion once the cost of all those "free" things they get from the government became more visible.

Trump comments were clear

[Anonymous Coward]

" The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!
        — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2017"

Presumably the tweet that this will clarify? But it's clear enough already, Trump is pissed at Bezos for owning Washington Post, and attacks Amazon because Bezos is the CEO. He doesn't even disguise the motive here.

What Trump's done of course is make any attempt to attack Amazon using the Executive powers open to court challenge. He cannot use executive powers to attack political enemies.

And what Trump's failed to do, was to get the Washingtom Post to censor its criticisms of Trump in exchange for not attacking Amazon. Hence the attacks continue.

Re:interstate commerce clause

[Anonymous Coward]

The Commerce Clause *needs* to be readjudicated (not thrown out per se), and Wickard v. Filburn overturned.

If they do it will be the death of

[oldgraybeard]

Small business on line sales. There are over 9000+ individual taxing districts in the US. Each requiring quarterly or if your sales are small yearly reports filed.
Each one is different, each one has it's own crazy rules. Here is one in the state of Minnesota. Say we sell a pair of gloves. If the user uses them to keep their hands clean they are taxable. If the user uses them for a safety purpose. handling glass with sharp edges, they are not taxable. How does the seller know? So they always tax!
The entire sales tax code, nation wide in the 1000s of taxing districts are a fuddled mess of crap.
Big online sellers like Amazon are all for it, they want to force all small independents in to Amazon stores where they skim 8% - 15% off the top of all invoice.totals as their cut.
Amazons master inventory system is a complete mess. They are always moving your products from the lower groups in to the 15% cut group. You call them up argue with them for a week and they will move that product back to the proper group. Next week they move 2 more up, rinse and repeat.
If the government wants a sales tax they should be clear concise and honest. Just set one rate, one reporting entity, once per year settling up. Which they never do, everything government does is a complete convoluted morass of crap..
How is a one-two person small shop supposed to file sale tax reports in all 9000+ taxing districts? Let alone quarterly reports/payments.
This will go through because the big operators want to force all the small online retailers to pay them a cut.

You may ask how I know, I run a business, have a state sales tax number. I also support other online sales sites from a tech stand point. I am in the trenches!

Just my 2 cents ;)

Re:If they do it will be the death of

[oldgraybeard]

Also forgot this, to get your products in front of the customer you need to be fulfilled by Amazon. So you ship a bunch of your product to Amazon and they charge you inventory handling and management fees.

The point is small margins become very small. The only way it pays is if you can do some volume sales. But Amazon always makes their cut ;)

Re:If they do it will be the death of

[Solandri]

There are services small businesses can subscribe to which will provide a database of sales tax rates for different zip codes and addresses, which is updated regularly. It might affect a small mom and pop shop doing a few dozen interstate orders a month. But any business with a reasonable volume of interstate sales can easily cope with the patchwork mess of sales tax rates.

The problem is none of these services will indemnify the business against their screw ups. If their database gets a sales tax rate wrong, and the business ends up collecting insufficient sales tax for some of their transactions, the business has to pay for it, not the company providing the sales tax database.

What really needs to happen is for the government to set up a central database of these sales tax rates. The burden would then be upon state and local governments to update this database with any changes they make to their sales tax rates. Any business in the country could then query this database for each sale, and be guaranteed that they are charging the correct amount of sales tax. If there's ever any error in the database, then the fault lies with the state or local government which should've made sure their database entry was correct. And thus the penalty for such errors falls directly upon the party making the error. Not the crazy system we have right now where the penalty is passed on to businesses who have little to no capability to verify thousands of sales tax rates across the country.