At the moment, Amazon already complies with the rules. The issue people are complaining about are the smaller companies that have been sitting on Amazon's coattails (use tax is collected by Amazon for direct Amazon purchases, but not for Amazon partners).
Use tax is not sales tax, in that you do not have to worry about counties and municpallities - interstate commerce rules applies to states, not individual entities inside that state. The rules aren't as complex as you think they are. Before the internet we had many large and small companies that were all required to pay use tax and they managed to do it with far less powerful computer than we have today.
Fallout Shelter is pretty good, no need to buy anything, you can't do too much at once, and you dont even need to be online (my gripe with other mobile games which stop working when I go mobile). When I first saw the spam attack trying to get me to play Westworld I did notice the similarities to Fallout Shelter even before I saw this article.
I think Gorsuch wanted a solid legal foundation that lower courts could use, whereas the decision as it stands doesn't clarify exactly how much law enforcement power is too much. So expect a revisiting in the future. There is room in the court for pragmatic decisions that affect just one case, as often the supreme court prefers that the lower courts come up with the precedents.
It's somewhat simplistic to label the justices as conservative or liberal. Some of them were appointed before such definitions changed (which happens every year). People are not ones and zeros, and so the justices are not either, and you cannot divide every political opinion into a clear cut conservative vs liberal bucket, especially as such definitions are fluid.
What's happening is that a lot of people assume that wanting strong government actions to prevent crime is a core conservative value when in fact it is not. It may currently be a main campaign issue of some big name Republicans but that doesn't make it a strong conservative value.
That's the thing about the supreme court, once appointed "for life" the members don't always follow the stereotypical patterns anymore
Also they tend to stick to some core ideals even if the general voting public has swayed their opinions over time and normal politicians are following along. Some a justice who may have been seen solid defender of conservative values a decade or two ago starts to face criticism of being too liberal since the litmus tests keep changing.
In general, protection of privacy from the government has been a solid conservative value for a very long time, it's only more recently that some strong strong law-and-order types are giving increased government power more priority than their stated conservative ideals. After all, you get more votes by promising to do something about crime than you can get by sticking to conservative ideals. If Reagan showed up today he'd be accused of being a RINO.
So don't report the use tax if you buy some food and eat it w/o bringing it into your home state. It may not be logical but it's been the practice for ages, it's nothing new. Use tax is essentially the same as sales tax (but only at the state level). Normally it's not an issue since the state you purchased in applies their own sales tax that you can deduct, and taxpayers do their own assessments, so it's rarely worth the effort to figure this out for purchases made in person. However for mail orders, phone orders, online purchases, or anything that gets shipped, then often the vendor is required to collect and pay the use tax based upon the delivery location.
The difference with online purchases is that for slightly more than two decades the internet was given an exemption from collecting use tax under the rationale that the US wanted to grow the fledgling internet economy.
Congress has full power to change some of these rules as well.
We had the same issue with mail order before the internet, a process that was working well for longer for a very long time. What's paid is "use tax" and not "sales tax" and the company pays to the state and not to counties or municipalities.
For example, in California you are required to pay use tax for online purchases you have made, but the rate is flat for the entire state, you don't have a complicated table listing all cities and counties.
I looked this up, different states had different rules about what "presence" was, and even just mailing in catalogs to the state might count as having a presence. And you were also only taxed at the state level because this as a use tax and not a sales tax.
For out-of-state mail order in the past you generally didn't have to worry about particular municipalities or counties. The difference is that for mail-order you are paying "use tax" to the state and not "sales tax". Each state had different rules of course, a mish mash just like today with online retail. The courts and congress agreed that such use tax on out of state purchases were allowed.
There were rules to decide if a company was liable for use tax or not. For example in 1993, Alabama held a company was not liable if it only sent catalogs into the state, in Colorado it were not liable if its only connection to the state was by US mail or common carrier, in Georgia and Hawaii it was always liable, and so forth.
So you basically figure out for each state if you were liable for paying use tax, and if so how much.
Most minimum wage good jobs these days don't seem to have as many teenagers as much as in the past. Most teens don't want those jobs, they prefer working at the GAP where they are allowed to check their social media all day while ignoring customers. There are plenty of adults who need those minimum wage jobs.
Basically the put four stones around the circumference of a circle, which forms a rectangle. So if all three sides of a right triangle happen to be integer values then it's Pythagorean? But just decrease the length of each integral unit until you it's fuzzy enough and you can't measure it accurately, and any right triangle drawn on the ground can be Pythagorean.
To me, the Pythagorean Theorem is about a^2 + b^2 = c^2, even if not an integer, and a proof that this is true. Merely noticing that 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 is not at all the same thing. This may appear to be mystical to ancient cultures but it's not the same thing as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Yes it's hard. But the situation as it was yesterday was unfair since it gave an unfair competitive advantage to online retailers. So the question is, do you prefer a fair and level competitive playing field or do you think the government granting unfair advantages is a viable long term economic strategy?
The alternative of allowing online retailers an unfair commercial advantage is an even worse situation. Either get rid of sales tax in every state or require all retailers to collect the sales tax. The method we had was fundamentally unfair. The sole reason Amazon got off the ground was precisely because they didn't charge sales tax, and this put most local book stores out of business.
And don't forget the rest of the world. Each country may have their own rules, so why stop at whining about merely 50 US states? Most online retailers would prefer to sell worldwide if they can, and in order to do so they must follow each country's rules.
If profit is involved then viable businesses will figure out a way.
So don't sell to those states? If an online retailer's business model was predicated upon having sales tax so that they could compete unfairly with local businesses, then maybe it's a good thing if they go out of business.
I can only see this as a net benefit to the economy. Fewer online sales but more local sales, more local stores can stay in business, more revenue to the states to keep the infrastructures working, more local jobs, etc.
Before online retailers there were stores that still shipped by mail, and they managed to figure out how to collect sales taxes even without today's modern computers helping them out. I think there's a lot of exaggeration when using the word "onerous" here.
The online retailers had a sweet sweet deal for over two decades here, being able to offer lower prices than their brick and mortar alternatives. They did not compete because they had a better product, or because they lowered the cost of operations through efficiencies, instead in so many cases the customers chose the online retailer precisely because there was no sales tax.
Maybe these online retailers should instead say thank you to the supreme court for the many years of preferential treatment they had been given instead of whining that this is going away.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment, Amazon already complies with the rules. The issue people are complaining about are the smaller companies that have been sitting on Amazon's coattails (use tax is collected by Amazon for direct Amazon purchases, but not for Amazon partners).
Use tax is not sales tax, in that you do not have to worry about counties and municpallities - interstate commerce rules applies to states, not individual entities inside that state. The rules aren't as complex as you think they are. Before the internet we had many large and small companies that were all required to pay use tax and they managed to do it with far less powerful computer than we have today.
Well sure, but that is not an excuse to ignore the law. Every non-internet company has had to comply by the rules.
Use tax has always been applied to out-of-state catalog sales! A few states don't have use tax, but most have some sort of requirements.
Sure, just don't sell into states or countries that have taxes. Why should internet companies be exempted from taxes when other companies aren't?
Start over, or find a new game.
Fallout Shelter is pretty good, no need to buy anything, you can't do too much at once, and you dont even need to be online (my gripe with other mobile games which stop working when I go mobile). When I first saw the spam attack trying to get me to play Westworld I did notice the similarities to Fallout Shelter even before I saw this article.
Did you take the fluffer job in Fallout 2?
This also seems to have canceled Google's plans to spy on the government from the inside.
I think Gorsuch wanted a solid legal foundation that lower courts could use, whereas the decision as it stands doesn't clarify exactly how much law enforcement power is too much. So expect a revisiting in the future. There is room in the court for pragmatic decisions that affect just one case, as often the supreme court prefers that the lower courts come up with the precedents.
It's somewhat simplistic to label the justices as conservative or liberal. Some of them were appointed before such definitions changed (which happens every year). People are not ones and zeros, and so the justices are not either, and you cannot divide every political opinion into a clear cut conservative vs liberal bucket, especially as such definitions are fluid.
What's happening is that a lot of people assume that wanting strong government actions to prevent crime is a core conservative value when in fact it is not. It may currently be a main campaign issue of some big name Republicans but that doesn't make it a strong conservative value.
That's the thing about the supreme court, once appointed "for life" the members don't always follow the stereotypical patterns anymore
Also they tend to stick to some core ideals even if the general voting public has swayed their opinions over time and normal politicians are following along. Some a justice who may have been seen solid defender of conservative values a decade or two ago starts to face criticism of being too liberal since the litmus tests keep changing.
In general, protection of privacy from the government has been a solid conservative value for a very long time, it's only more recently that some strong strong law-and-order types are giving increased government power more priority than their stated conservative ideals. After all, you get more votes by promising to do something about crime than you can get by sticking to conservative ideals. If Reagan showed up today he'd be accused of being a RINO.
So don't report the use tax if you buy some food and eat it w/o bringing it into your home state. It may not be logical but it's been the practice for ages, it's nothing new. Use tax is essentially the same as sales tax (but only at the state level). Normally it's not an issue since the state you purchased in applies their own sales tax that you can deduct, and taxpayers do their own assessments, so it's rarely worth the effort to figure this out for purchases made in person. However for mail orders, phone orders, online purchases, or anything that gets shipped, then often the vendor is required to collect and pay the use tax based upon the delivery location.
The difference with online purchases is that for slightly more than two decades the internet was given an exemption from collecting use tax under the rationale that the US wanted to grow the fledgling internet economy.
Congress has full power to change some of these rules as well.
We had the same issue with mail order before the internet, a process that was working well for longer for a very long time. What's paid is "use tax" and not "sales tax" and the company pays to the state and not to counties or municipalities.
For example, in California you are required to pay use tax for online purchases you have made, but the rate is flat for the entire state, you don't have a complicated table listing all cities and counties.
I looked this up, different states had different rules about what "presence" was, and even just mailing in catalogs to the state might count as having a presence. And you were also only taxed at the state level because this as a use tax and not a sales tax.
For out-of-state mail order in the past you generally didn't have to worry about particular municipalities or counties. The difference is that for mail-order you are paying "use tax" to the state and not "sales tax". Each state had different rules of course, a mish mash just like today with online retail. The courts and congress agreed that such use tax on out of state purchases were allowed.
There were rules to decide if a company was liable for use tax or not. For example in 1993, Alabama held a company was not liable if it only sent catalogs into the state, in Colorado it were not liable if its only connection to the state was by US mail or common carrier, in Georgia and Hawaii it was always liable, and so forth.
So you basically figure out for each state if you were liable for paying use tax, and if so how much.
Most minimum wage good jobs these days don't seem to have as many teenagers as much as in the past. Most teens don't want those jobs, they prefer working at the GAP where they are allowed to check their social media all day while ignoring customers. There are plenty of adults who need those minimum wage jobs.
I can't think of any burger I've had in a few decades that has required "harsh chewing".
How do you know Dont-eat-beans didn't rent from Pythagorus?
This does however give me a name for my next Argonian character.
Basically the put four stones around the circumference of a circle, which forms a rectangle. So if all three sides of a right triangle happen to be integer values then it's Pythagorean? But just decrease the length of each integral unit until you it's fuzzy enough and you can't measure it accurately, and any right triangle drawn on the ground can be Pythagorean.
To me, the Pythagorean Theorem is about a^2 + b^2 = c^2, even if not an integer, and a proof that this is true. Merely noticing that 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 is not at all the same thing. This may appear to be mystical to ancient cultures but it's not the same thing as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Yes it's hard. But the situation as it was yesterday was unfair since it gave an unfair competitive advantage to online retailers. So the question is, do you prefer a fair and level competitive playing field or do you think the government granting unfair advantages is a viable long term economic strategy?
The alternative of allowing online retailers an unfair commercial advantage is an even worse situation. Either get rid of sales tax in every state or require all retailers to collect the sales tax. The method we had was fundamentally unfair. The sole reason Amazon got off the ground was precisely because they didn't charge sales tax, and this put most local book stores out of business.
And don't forget the rest of the world. Each country may have their own rules, so why stop at whining about merely 50 US states? Most online retailers would prefer to sell worldwide if they can, and in order to do so they must follow each country's rules.
If profit is involved then viable businesses will figure out a way.
So don't sell to those states? If an online retailer's business model was predicated upon having sales tax so that they could compete unfairly with local businesses, then maybe it's a good thing if they go out of business.
I can only see this as a net benefit to the economy. Fewer online sales but more local sales, more local stores can stay in business, more revenue to the states to keep the infrastructures working, more local jobs, etc.
Before online retailers there were stores that still shipped by mail, and they managed to figure out how to collect sales taxes even without today's modern computers helping them out. I think there's a lot of exaggeration when using the word "onerous" here.
The online retailers had a sweet sweet deal for over two decades here, being able to offer lower prices than their brick and mortar alternatives. They did not compete because they had a better product, or because they lowered the cost of operations through efficiencies, instead in so many cases the customers chose the online retailer precisely because there was no sales tax.
Maybe these online retailers should instead say thank you to the supreme court for the many years of preferential treatment they had been given instead of whining that this is going away.