States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules • Hacker News Board

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#571

Post by techsin101 » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 5:59 AM UTC

There should be no sales tax to begin with, Or income tax or property tax.... Most taxes can be simplified and reduced to a 1 simple wealth tax.

If you look at this matters with some attention you realize system works against poor...

Only income taxes are progressive. And Rich don't get richer because of their income.

Whether you're a trillion dollar company or about to make your first sale to pay rent you owe same amout of sales tax.

Wether you live in NYC and pay 3k in rent or live in Alaska you pay same federal income tax.

.... Wealth tax is way simpler... It let's govt tax wealth/income on its last form. Like a fraction in reduced form, or equation that's been simplified.

Easier to conduct business, easier to start business, easier to pay taxes, easier to be poor. Much much fair to all.

Capital tax is not same as wealth tax. In fact if you have wealth tax there is no need for capital tax.

I suggest 4% wealth tax and remove pretty much all other taxes.

If your wealth is 200 billion, first year you pay 8 billion. If your wealth is $5000 then you pay only.. $200, doesn't matter if you earned 400k. If you didn't accquire assets you spent it and some else have that now so they will pay it...if you bought stuff then your wealth isn't really 5k

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#572

Post by gnicholas » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:05 AM UTC

techsin101 wrote: post #571

There should be no sales tax to begin with, Or income tax or property tax.... Most taxes can be simplified and reduced to a 1 simple wealth tax. If you look at this matters with some attention you realize system works against poor... Only income taxes are progressive. And Rich don't get richer because of their income. Whether you're a trillion dollar company or about to make your first sale to pay rent you owe same a…

This disincentives savings and is in many ways the opposite of VAT taxes, which many tax scholars hold out as one of the most efficient ways to raise revenue without distorting desirable economic behavior.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#573

Post by patates » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:12 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #560

patates wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Credit cards are mostly supplied by a couple huge companies that aren't interested in improving their rates. This situation is called an oligopoly. I don't think it has something to do with government sanctioned rent seeking.

Government-sanctioned rent-seekers are not the only kind. The comment by User23 was about payment system rent-seekers in general, with no mention of the government.

Yes but the mentioned problem comes from the companies forming an oligopoly.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#574

Post by seanp2k2 » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:30 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #517

User23 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the service they're providing is only necessary because of artificial barriers, then basically yes. The banking cartel that controls the payment system is a huge fan of collecting economic rents, yes.

So how do you purport to have a global electronic payment network?

VISA and MasterCard do pretty well from what I hear. PayPal too.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#575

Post by hakfoo » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:43 AM UTC

anonymous5133 wrote: post #466

astura wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unless you are extremely familiar with local tax law you have no idea which purchases are even going to be taxed. If you go to the grocery store and buy the following: tampons raw chicken rotisserie chicken prepared sandwich bread and cold cuts toilet paper condoms 20 oz soda 12 pack soda juice milk prepackaged donuts donuts from the bakery cat food beer DO you know which of those items are going to be taxed and…

You just use tax software to do it. Then you can just classify each item. Most small businesses only sell a few thousand products and others sell less than a hundred. How does it take to classify all of those? A few hours tops. After that the software does the rest....condoms going to 32932 zip...taxable...raw rice going to 92322 zip...exempt. very easy for a computer to do. The software provider would do all the res…

This still requires vendors to correctly mark up their products-- to a level of detail that handles all the local rate differences, and shopping carts to be retooled to store said classifications and pass them to whatever tax-calculation service you need. Not to mention paying for the service to query.

It's probably less of a problem for someone starting from zero, but I'd imagine there's a type of vendor that's a huge nightmare. The firm that basically said "we can sell anything we can get from our vendor", and stocked their cart with thousands of SKUs, many of which exist only as lines in CSV files so they may not even know what they are offhand. The cart was probably built in the Eisenhower administration so good luck extending it.

It would be interesting to see some states offer a "trade convenience for savings" model-- rather than try to navigate a maze of regional rates and product categories to decide if a widget is taxed at 8.2% or 8.3, just file a one-page form and charge everyone 8.5% on everything. Saying "pay us $50 per year more in taxes, rather than spend $50k and ongoing service subscriptions to optimize the rates down to the penny" is a pretty compelling argument.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#576

Post by SyneRyder » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:18 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #410

ajross wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100k of South Dakota revenue is either an almost exclusively local single-owner business or a much larger internet shop. But regardless, that kind of number is a full time job. If you're selling over the internet and making a full time job out of it, you can handle computing sales tax for SD residents. Yes, it's burdensome. Yes, it would be good to have a simpler federal framework for this. No, it's not the end of t…

> $100k of South Dakota revenue is either an almost exclusively local single-owner business or a much larger internet shop. Note, though, that for South Dakota it is $100k in annual revenue or 200 transactions per year. Consider a company selling a subscription product/service for $5/month. If they had a mere 17 customers in South Dakota, their South Dakota annual revenue would be a mere $1020, but they would have 20…

I think this needs to be upvoted more. The 200 transaction threshold is very low for low priced products - I sell a $20 Photoshop plugin, and $4000 is not much revenue to suddenly have to register for & remit South Dakota taxes. Apparently Vermont will have the same 200 transaction threshold [1].

In practice though, indie retailers will use reseller services that collect & remit the taxes on their behalf, in return for a ~10% cut. I use FastSpring for my shopping cart, others use Paddle or Gumroad. The EU has had similar tax laws on internet sales since the mid 2000s, and Australia will enforce their own 10% internet tax on non-Australian internet businesses from July 1st.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/amicus-brief-south-dakota-v-wayfai...

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#577

Post by SyneRyder » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #521

ballenf wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got it kind of backwards. The absence of tax collection is what allowed Amazon to become Amazon and this change is now a barrier to a new entity challenging Amazon. Amazon voluntarily started collecting taxes nationwide without a blip to its bottom line. The new law will in fact put Amazon's first-party goods in parity with 3rd party sales. Third party sellers could often undercut Amazon's own pricing…

All this would do is create an opportunity for a SaaS startup or existing payments provider to offer collecting the correct amount of tax for you. I personally worked on this sort of problem for a large company; most of the work is in figuring out what the business logic ought to be; turning it into code is (largely) trivial. Figuring out the logic only needs to be done once, and the payments provider is the natural…

Indeed, several already do this - Fastspring, Paddle, and there are services like Taxamo (although I'm not sure if Taxamo actually remit the tax on your behalf, or are just an API to calculate what your obligations are).

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#578

Post by SyneRyder » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #510

coldseattle wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly the point. Only the biggest companies with large pools of compliance accountants and attorneys will be able to do business.

Unless it can be outsourced? Companies providing an Internet storefront that takes care of sales tax should do well. Could Stripe do this?

I mentioned it elsewhere in this thread too, but some companies like Paddle & Fastspring (and I think 2Checkout/Avangate) already do this.

As far as I know, Stripe doesn't do this, they only provide integrations for services that will calculate your tax obligations. (My guess is governments will eventually force Stripe to pay the taxes themselves directly.) Here's Stripe's page with tax calculation integration options:

https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/tax-calculation

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#579

Post by pas » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

davidgh wrote: post #569

Tloewald wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system of local sales taxes doesn't look awesome ever. If there were one economic reform I would push in the US it would be advertised price is final price (i.e. if you say "I'm selling this for $9.99" then that's all you pay, and the taxes are all inclusive) this would pretty much force underlying tax reform as businesses lost their shit having to deal with the insanity. Note that the disaster area that is US…

While I appreciate the simplicity of “tax-inclusive pricing”, I think that “tax is added” vs. “tax is included” pricing is highly important for transparency. Frustrating as it may be for other reasons, I like that a buyer is reminded every time they walk up to checkout how much they are paying the government for the privilege. I think that’s part of the reason why EU VAT rates are so much higher than US sales tax rat…

As someone from (and in) the EU, I'm very much aware of the VAT. It's almost literally printed on every fucking thing. It's certainly very much apparent on any bill, receipt, invoice, sales printout and whatever piece of paper or data we get during economic exchanges.

Since VAT is a tax that is paid by the customer but usually remitted to the tax authority by the merchant, it has to be shown on the receipt.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#580

Post by oldcynic » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 9:57 AM UTC

davidgh wrote: post #569

Tloewald wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system of local sales taxes doesn't look awesome ever. If there were one economic reform I would push in the US it would be advertised price is final price (i.e. if you say "I'm selling this for $9.99" then that's all you pay, and the taxes are all inclusive) this would pretty much force underlying tax reform as businesses lost their shit having to deal with the insanity. Note that the disaster area that is US…

While I appreciate the simplicity of “tax-inclusive pricing”, I think that “tax is added” vs. “tax is included” pricing is highly important for transparency. Frustrating as it may be for other reasons, I like that a buyer is reminded every time they walk up to checkout how much they are paying the government for the privilege. I think that’s part of the reason why EU VAT rates are so much higher than US sales tax rat…

When I'm buying privately I care about the price I pay - not the price a business can pay when reclaiming the VAT. It's not like VAT is going away with next change of govt, or even with Brexit. Everything gives you a receipt breaking out the VAT or shows it in the online basket and checkout for those that care, or reclaim, so I don't see how it lacks transparency.

Why does it matter who of buyer or retailer covers the few pennies, or if retailer makes a small price change to stick at a .99 or .00 price point? Retailers have done this forever in both directions.