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Supreme Court Rules States Can Require Online Retailers To Collect Sales Tax (npr.org)
New submitter zippo01 shares a report: Online shopping will soon become more expensive after the U.S. Supreme court ruled Thursday that states can require internet retailers to collect sales taxes. The 5-4 decision broke with 50 years' worth of legal rulings that barred states from imposing sales taxes on most purchases their residents make from out-of-state retailers. The decision was a victory for South Dakota, which had asked the court to uphold its recently passed law imposing an internet sales tax. "Our state is losing millions for education, health care and infrastructure, and our citizens are harmed by an uneven playing field," said Marty Jackley, South Dakota's attorney general.
You'll, of course, make it illegal to use this money for anything else, right?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
States have no right to regulate interstate commerce. As much of a problem as sales tax is online, this isn't the way to solve it. We need a constitutional amendment to even give states these powers. I'm not saying we shouldn't do that either - just that we haven't.
This is not something that the supreme court should even have the power to decide.
Remember this the next time Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch or Clarence Thomas talk about the following the original text of the constitution.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
In general I am OK with states charging sales tax for online purchases. As Sales Tax takes advantages of both Progressive and Regressive taxing. Being that the Rich will in general buy more so they will be funding more to the government, while taking the simplicity of a fixed rate tax.
Online Purchases still need to be shipped to the sates, thus needing to use its infrastructure to deliver them. So all in all in this day in age Taxing internet purchases is perfectly reasonable.
However the argument that the tax revenue is hurting any particular initiative is more to blame on bad leadership, or misaligned priorities. If the state wants more money to Education, then they would find a way to fund it better. Even if it means cutting money on services it deems as lower priority, and the leadership will need to take the responsibility of saying that that service doesn't deserve the money over Education. Also their are other taxing methods that can be applied to help better fund thing, all at their own tradeoffs as well.
Sales tax on internet is an easy win with low political repercussion. Because the extra cost of sales tax, isn't going to hurt the economy. because if they want the product and it is prices closer to a local store. They may want to go to the store to buy it and get the convince of getting it now, and returning it the same day. If it is a hard to find item in the area, you can still get it online, just for 5-10% more.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A small business that can't manage to collect a sales tax doesn't seem like much of a business to me.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Use taxes are very common... though not often paid.
Here in WA we have places that have a 10% sales tax rate, and it is not uncommon for people to take a drive down to Portland for some big purchases, were there is no sales tax.
Hell, a neighbor of mine used to have their cars registered there to avoid WA taxes.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Wow, seeing Roberts and Ginsburg not voting with their cohorts implies that this was actually a real close ruling and not just some right/left bullshit.
The only problem I see with the state taxing online purchases is that small online retailers will have extra overhead to meet tax requirements for all states.
Small businesses now have to navigate several hundred different tax schemes (states have multiple tax zones, etc), That's going to be expensive. This ruling only benefits the big players such as Amazon by placing another burden on their smaller competitors. That's why Bezos dropped his opposition to it.
They have not ruled that states can require online retailers to collect sales tax in general. They have overturned the argument that there is no nexus because of No Physical Presence, and Nexus can be established in other ways for large National retailers such as Quill or Amazon, for example. The court ruled there --- This quantity of business could not have occurred unless the seller availed itself of the substantial privilege of carrying on business in South Dakota.
And respondents are large, national companies that undoubtedly maintain an extensive virtual presence. Thus, the substantial nexus requirement of Complete Auto is satisfied in this case
When politicians designate new tax revenues as going towards some worthy cause (lottery profits for education, for example), rather than increasing the money spent on education, the lottery money instead offsets other tax revenues, freeing them up to be spent on politicians pet projects.
If the lottery generates $20M for education, the net result is that $20M in lottery money takes the place of $20M that used to come from property taxes.
Politicians expect you to think that the new revenue is in addition to what was already being spent, but it isn't.
Ken