Slashdot Mirror
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.
Regressive taxes ought to be illegal anyway. There's really no good reason for them to exist, only bad ones.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
" 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.
South Dakota wants everyone else to obey their sales tax laws, whether or not they're located in South Dakota, while at the same time benefiting from usury laws not being enforceable across state lines. There's a reason most credit cards in the U.S. are issued from child corporations in South Dakota: South Dakota allows effectively unlimited interest rates on credit cards. They're perfectly fine with state-by-state enforcement when it benefits them.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
This would throw out the interstate commerce clause of the US constitution. Slippery slope, but it wouldn't be the first time.
So to simplify the whole issue, have a Federal sales tax and 80% money is to be distributed to the states on a per capita basis and the other 20% to be distributed to the states upon a need basis (some US states simply lack revenue sources and need to be economically stabilised, to promote development of revenue sources) and zero exemptions from that federal sales tax. This would help to end the corrupt practice of state tax free bidding wars by corporations, which has to come to an end, as it is extremely corrupt and bias and against the principle of law, that all should be treated equally under law, no tax evasion by campaign donations for anyone.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
My impression is that this case is misleading. No matter who you purchase from, you owe sales tax. The only question is reporting. I, with my reseller license in California have to pay California Sales Taxes I collect for products sold to people in California. I report on a city and county basis to the BoE (Board of Equalization), and pay them quarterly, all the taxes I collect. Since I don't have a filing with any boards in any other state, I don't collect or report, but my customers are still obligated to self-report. You don't get to not pay taxes because you bought from someone outside the state. Besides, if you buy from overseas, you still owe sales tax. They just don't report it because they don't have a filing requirement with the boards. This is a case where the states want to enforce resale license filing requirements on every reseller in every state. In a decade, they will want every reseller who ships to the us to file
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
Reporting isn't the issue. Collection and distribution is. If the online companies were allowed to "report" the shipping location of an item for sales tax reasons, and that appease the state, then the problem would have been solved years ago. The states want the retailer to collect taxes without providing the retailer with a map. it's simply impossible. So, as was settled in the 1800s, mail order companies don't collect sales tax. Period. Whether your mail delivery is from a mail order (the old days, you mailed a check, or ordered C.O.D with a physical letter), or Internet order doesn't change the hundreds of years of practice.
I've lived in Dallas. There are towns were a street can have 4 different tax rates. All in the same zip code, on the same street. Only with a full tax-map could a retailer hope to keep up. And almost none do. Those required to collect often (illegally) collect only the state rate. Theoretically, and often legally, they are required to collect the separate rates for every residence (Texas kept it as a simple list, a tax rate for every address), but the states don't like sharing that. Those that have it would be mocked for having it in a simple text file, and with no actual intelligence behind it, other than someone manually typed in a tax code for every address. The others often don't know, themselves, so how could they tell anyone else?
The rules were written around a physical store. They figure out their tax code once, and it never changes.
The online retailers are objecting so much because there are literally millions of tax locations in the US, and they'd need to know them all all the time. Someone changes a mass transit tax, or collects a special local tax for a new school or sports stadium, and every online retailer on the planet must update their system.
More rational is to notify the State of the delivery address and pre-tax value. Then the sate will have a better path to enforcement of the "use tax" that already applies. That's the real complaint. It's too hard for the state to enforce their own laws, so they want the online retailers to bear the expense and trouble.
Learn to love Alaska
All of them (in practice). If you are rich, you don't pay sales taxes. You get tax credits and deductions for them. You are too poor to understand, or you'd already know that.
Well I'm an accountant and I'll disagree. Rich people pay sales tax too and it's easy to prove that they do. The difference is that sales tax amounts to a rounding error in their overall financial picture. A sales tax of 6% on groceries affects someone making $20K/year a LOT more than someone making $200K/year. Rich people don't get a special rich person discount at the grocery store or at the car dealership. In some they can run some expenses through a corporation which gets some deductions (not credits) but most of what they buy they pay sales tax on too, same as anyone else.
That's the stupidest argument ever. Yes, you aren't the first I've heard say that. If people, not corporations pay taxes, then my employer, a corporation, pays all my taxes, not any people.
Not only is that not a stupid argument, it's got a name and it's a well understood concept. It's called tax incidence and it's demonstrably correct. Let's use an example. If we tax gasoline sales the oil companies are going to be able to pass most or all of that cost to consumers so the party bearing the burden of that tax isn't the shareholders of the oil company but the car owners.
You should be in politics. Yes, that's an insult.
If you disagree with his argument fine but no need to be a dick about it.
If we follow this line of reasoning, were a state can force vendors and citizens located wholly in another state to comply with the first state's sales tax laws, why can they not be forced to comply with another state's gun laws, abortion laws, marriage laws, pollution laws, welfare laws, ...?
Most states *already* tax internet and catalog purchases, indeed all purchases made out-of-state for goods brought into the state. They just currently cannot force merchants outside those states to comply and act as proxy tax-collectors for them.
These are called Use Taxes.
The thing is, States are upset that no one pays Use Taxes and now want to force businesses in *other states* into servitude as tax collectors.
What right does one state have to force a brick-and-mortar retailer in another state to collect sales taxes from border-crossing customers? None.
Why then should they be able to force an out-of-state retailer of the virtual sort to collect sales taxes from virtual border-crossing customers?
If I lived in North Dakota and I hopped across the border to Montana and bought a book at a shop there (no sales tax in Montana) then took it back with me to ND, I would be responsible for paying any use tax owed, not the book shopkeeper in Montana. Same rules should apply to the Montana shopkeeper if he mails my books to me at home.
In a brick-and-mortar case, we know the location to use for the transaction as the entire transaction occurs between people located within a single state and subject to the laws of they state they are all physically in. So the state can force a store to collect sales tax from its customers who come into the store and make purchases.
For an online purchase, it's not so clear?
Purchaser's location? What if the purchaser is in a hotel room far from home, maybe even out of the country? Or on an airplane?
Shipped-to address for the purchase or Purchaser's mailing address? I foresee a lot of Montana mailing addresses once someone in Montana realizes the business opportunity inherent in sales-tax avoidance arbitrage.
Purchaser's home address? What if the item is shipped elsewhere, e.g. a gift to an aunt in a 3rd state? And why would I tell anyone my home address instead of my mailing address?
Sender's address? Which one, the HQ? The warehouse? The fulfillment center?
Will states be able to force out-of-state brick-and-mortars to quiz customers and collect and remit use taxes on the assumption that their citizens temporarily in another state just bought something that they *should* have bought at home, thus depriving the home state of revenue?
If states force online retailers to collect their sales tax - thus burdening the online retailer with knowing about all tax jurisdictions, having common descriptions of items country wide so you know what is even taxable and its particular rate on any given day then....
make all non-online retailers handle the sales tax rates the purchaser would pay at their home and remit them to their home states as well! You make a purchase, show your ID and then the sales tax rate will be whatever it would be for your home address. If you come from a state that is sensible and doesn't collect sales tax - you wouldn't have to pay it anywhere. If you come from a state that is nuts - then you're equally repressed everywhere in the United States you shop.
Seems fair to me. Your opinions will probably vary.
Come on Donny, could you at least TRY to know what the fuck you're talking about before you start flapping your gums like that?
Also could you grow the fuck up and accept that Jeff Bezos is just a better and more successful businessman than you are? Seriously.
Interestingly, the document you "linked" indicates that you are wrong. Here's the relevant quote, right in the Introduction: (emphasis mine)
So it's more complicated than you claim. Especially with 50 states, all with varying rules.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia