Go ahead, pass the Internet tax. Your (foreign) competitors thank you.

Businesses have never, in general, been required to collect sales taxes for other states. It doesn't matter if the sale is on the Internet, mail order, or face-to-face. In some states (Washington is one for sure, but I believe there are others) you can even get out of paying their own sales tax for face-to-face purchases. For example, if a resident of Alaska (no state sales tax) has proper ID, he can travel to Washington state and pay no Washington tax on his purchases (you do have to certify that you're planning to take your purchase out of Washington state -- if it's going to be consumed or used in Washington, you have to pay Washington tax).

See:

http://dor.wa.gov/Content/FindTaxesAndRates/RetailSalesTax/N...

No, I never claimed "competitiveness is a non-factor in considering regulation".

I merely said, in a lot more words, that competitiveness should not be the BE ALL END ALL factor in considering regulation. And I argued that competitiveness can also be a BAD factor in considering regulation.

Moreover, I said that this kind of "competitiveness" while great for the company that benefits from it, it's not that great for the country that hosts the company and its general population, and it can be a race to the bottom.

Let me give an exaggerated example. If some regime had a huge competitive advantage against the US by forcing people, including children to work on their factories for almost nothing, should the US, and other affluent markets, consider introducing slavery and child labor again, in order to remain competitive?

No, they should embargo, tariff, and tax the hell out of that regime's products, to ensure that competitiveness is due to improvements in engineering, efficiency, innovation, etc, not backwards practices and "a race to the bottom".

>>a company can be American in name, but in no more benefit to the US as a country than Toyota or Samsung. >What does this mean? Toyota and Sumsung are a huge benefit to the American economy. A Toyota Tundra has more US manufactured parts than most "American" trucks. It seems you fail to realize the benefits of a globalized economy, and therefore promote American isolationism to bring us back to our glory days.

It means that the "benefits of a globalised economy" are mainly for company owners, moguls, managers, golden boys and the like, and more often praised than seen in reality.

I'm not talking about numbers in balance sheets, but about how those numbers trickle down to the country's economy. Samsung (or Apple) can make billions in the US market, but that doesn't mean you get to add those to the GDP and be happy about it.

(The fact that Toyota also makes parts in the US is just a diversion from my main point. It's the "throwing a bone" to the US market action that I referred to in my comment. Toyota can open some part factories in the US (to silence the worries of the locals) and still pay piss all in taxes through labyrinthine out-of-country logistics and accounting -- and that's on top of tax cut deals made with the US government for them to agree to open their factories in the first place)).

Easy DNS charges $19.95 CAD/yr for its basic package of DNS services for a domain. Amazon's Route 53 charges $0.50 per month, or $6.00 USD/yr. Given the OP claim to be "traditionally anti-big government, pro-free market, pro-capitalist whack jobs," they are offering a service 3x more expensive than a comparable service US company. Maybe EasyDNS has some extra goodies that Route 53 doesn't to justify the higher price. Either way, that is what drives Mr. Smith's invisible hand, and acting like US states enforcing their 6% or 8% or even 8.75% sales tax is some sort of game changer is absurd.

The OP seems to woefully misunderstand that this is not a new tax. This requires any internet business with over $1 million in sales -- which I'm guessing doesn't apply to a lot of startups whose founders/employees read HN, btw, mine included -- to collect any applicable state/local sales tax at the point of sale, just like pretty much every local business. And if these businesses are getting squeezed by internet retailers, I'm guessing it has nothing to do with sales tax. Recently I needed a DisplayPort/DVI adapter, and impatiently went to Best Buy, where the only one I could buy was $30. Then I saw this one on Amazon for $4.95 on Amazon -- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BHHIA4 -- promptly ordered it, and returned the Best Buy one, even though Amazon sales tax meant I actually paid $5.45. Best Buy is getting destroyed because retailers can sell similar products at a 84% discount, and that would still be true if it was only a 78% discount.

So, to the OP and all the other people I've seen on HN lamenting that this bill is akin to exhuming Adam Smith's corpse and urinating on it: can we please stop acting like this is the end of the world? Making sweeping states predicting economic outcomes without practical considerations (e.g. many internet retailers have a pricing advantage that dwarfs sales tax) and human responses (an effective 6-10% increase on purchases -- 'effective' because this is a tax they should have been paying anyway -- is not really accomplishing much. There are times to get infuriated about the government fucking up the free markets and disincentivizing capitalist innovation and production, but I don't think this is one of them.