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Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (This New Law Will Ensure You Pay More For Online Purchases...)
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Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (This New Law Will Ensure You Pay More For Online Purchases...)
In another brilliant move aimed at destroying the few table scraps of economic freedom which remain in the Land of the Free, a bipartisan group of esteemed lawmakers in the United States Congress has introduced the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013.
Remember the golden rule of legislation: the more noble the name of the law sounds, the more disastrous its results. This one is no exception.
Generally speaking in the United States, retailers must collect state and local sales tax at the point of sale. When you walk into a Main Street shop in Anytown, California, you’ll pay the sticker price PLUS hefty city and state sales taxes that can easily be 10% or more.
But if you purchase goods through the mail from a company in, say, Nevada or Oregon, either through the mail or online, no sales tax is charged. This goes back to a 20+ year old US Supreme Court decision which exempted out of state companies from collecting sales tax.
Well, according to the intellectual luminaries in Congress, local retailers are at a disadvantage, effectively having to charge 10%+ more for their products than an out-of-state retailer.
And by God, they’re going to do something about it. After all, it’s just not ‘fair’ that mom and pop retailers on main street have to charge sales tax, while mom and pop retailers on the Internet do not.
The Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 aims to level the playing field by requiring online retailers to collect some sort of sales tax from their customers. Needless to say, if the bill is passed, it will be the customer who ends up paying the price.
The thinking on this is completely absurd.
One of the primary reasons people shop online is because online retailers have reduced overhead costs, and these cost savings are passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices.
So if the idea is to ensure that brick and mortar retailers don’t suffer any competitive price disadvantage, why not just regulate prices altogether? Or even better, why not just abolish sales taxes altogether?
That’s because this bill has absolutely nothing to do with fairness, and everything to do with the government taking more of your money. This bill constitutes STEP 1 on the road to a national sales tax, which, given the state of national and state balance sheets, is a financial inevitability.
It’s the most insidious form of deceit– creating new taxes masquerading as ‘fairness’. It’s a total fraud, brought to you by the same people who tell us that there is no inflation, and that we must sexually assault airline passengers in order to protect ourselves from men in caves.
Your argument contradicts itself. Get out your Google or Bing machine and search for "tax nexus" which was, by the way, the brainchild of western, conservative states such as Utah, Nevada, Arizona, etc. who were losing sales tax revenue dollars due to relatively close proximity to California, primarily as a way to "level the field," similar to what the linked article says. I guess that since it was an idea originally implemented by states, it's OK and the Feds trying to make it more uniform is bad, eh? Businesses have been dealing with this for over 15 years but no one has started whining about that. How would you feel about a FEDERAL sales tax on such transactions instead of state and local? BTW, sales taxes are generally, though not always, based on where possession of goods or taxable services takes place. Texas is different in that as they allow sales tax to be collected at the point of sale for items being shipped or delivered. It's a convenience thing for the businesses who have to collect the sales tax. Please bring a game named after one of the first couple of letters in the alphabet next time.
Your argument contradicts itself. Get out your Google or Bing machine and search for "tax nexus" which was, by the way, the brainchild of western, conservative states such as Utah, Nevada, Arizona, etc. who were losing sales tax revenue dollars due to relatively close proximity to California, primarily as a way to "level the field," similar to what the linked article says. I guess that since it was an idea originally implemented by states, it's OK and the Feds trying to make it more uniform is bad, eh? Businesses have been dealing with this for over 15 years but no one has started whining about that. How would you feel about a FEDERAL sales tax on such transactions instead of state and local? BTW, sales taxes are generally, though not always, based on where possession of goods or taxable services takes place. Texas is different in that as they allow sales tax to be collected at the point of sale for items being shipped or delivered. It's a convenience thing for the businesses who have to collect the sales tax. Please bring a game named after one of the first couple of letters in the alphabet next time.
I don't see a connection to western conservative states, such as Utah, Nevada and Arizona. Can you post a link?
Per this article, NY started it off in 2008 going after Amazon. Next came Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
The article mentions that Colorado and Oklahoma tried "different approaches" than the Amazon laws of NY, but it isn't real clear how different.
Nonetheless, the only "western" state I see on that list - other than liberal California - is Colorado. And Colorado is generally regarded as a purple state - neither red nor blue.
So, where do you get the idea that the "tax nexus" attempt at grabbing sales tax started as a conservative, western state idea?
ExNYer, I'm not posting a link because I don't want to spend the time looking for one. I'm speaking from over 30 years' exprerience in costing, pricing, selling and then shipping industrial construction products all over the US and overseas. Trust me, sales tax implications matter in this. The big push in the late 90s for nexus all came, at least in this part of the country, from the western states I named. This is just information and background. Do with it what you like since your opinion has no bearing on the facts. Nevada was the most extreme in enforcement because of the gigantic boom from the late 90s to 2008. Almost all of the manufacturers I deal with become all pissy and by the book when they see a Nevada destination. Some of them had been sued by Nevada and lost, thus having had to cough up some back sales taxes that were not collected plus penalties and interest. And, yes, the Feds were helping them out with this. I hope Nevada hung onto some of that revenue, it looks like they needed it.
Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (This New Law Will Ensure You Pay More For Online Purchases...)
