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

What exactly is your complaint here? Are you opposed to sales taxes on principle? If not, what's your complaint? Properly accounting for sales and business taxes, as well as following other laws, in a jurisdiction in which you do business is a basic cost of doing business. The U.S. just happens to be a country of 50 sovereign jurisdictions, each with autonomy in how they structure their sales and business taxes. Does this make accounting for taxes complicated? Sure. It makes lots of things complicated. But we did it on purpose. Why should Congress insulate you from that reality?

The internet certainly makes it easier to say take orders from people in many different jurisdictions at once, but why should you get to avoid the other business realities of operating in multiple jurisdictions just because you're an internet business? You might see everyone as just an IP address, but in the real world, groups of those IP addresses are parts of sovereign entities called state and national governments, and each of those groups are governed by different laws. Just being an internet business shouldn't insulate you from the reality that exists once you break through the IP address abstraction.

You still owe use taxes on that.

>Who was making that point?

Lots of people. Including the EasyDNS post, implicitly.

>How do you know? Would countries that employ child labor be slingshotted into the first-world because they adopted effective regulations? I speculate they'd be unemployed and go hungry.

Only I made the reverse argument: that countries without child labour should not introduce it to compete with those countries.

And in general, that countries with higher working standards should not lower them to compete with third world countries, dictatorships etc, in a race to the bottom.

But, to also answer your question, I'd rather they go hungry than they use child labor, if that were the two options. Would you be OK with forced labor, ie slavery, if that was their only way to be competitive and not "go hungry"?

All this is a false dichotomy you set up anyway. It's not "child labor" vs "hungry". Child labor is not employed because it's their only hope to compete, it's merely employed because they lack the regulations to enforce otherwise. If the employers in that country (and the huge multinationals that contract them) could not take advantage of 12 year old children in sweatshops, they'd pay a little more and employ their parents.

It's not a case of "we can compete any other way". It's a case, "Hey, the laws here allow me to fuck over these people for an increased profit, so why not do it?".

>Again, how do you know? Did Michael Moore tell you?

Well, for one I'm not an American, and I have far wider horizons than Michael Moore. Should I also assume a caricature of you as some Fox News watching foaming at the mouth republican? It would be of similar quality and subtlety to your Michael Moore thing. Quite provincial, are we?

Anyway, no Michael didn't tell me. Not being provincial, following world economy news, a quite extensive reading on the matter, and travelling (but not as some naive first world tourist), "told me".

> 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. Again, how do you know? Did Michael Moore tell you? > 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. What? How does Apple not affect the GDP? What aren't you happy about?

> So re-frame it as the removal of the exemption. Makes no difference how you spell that out, it adds up to an increase in taxes on goods sold / bought for American companies.

No, it doesn't. US buyers were already responsible for local use taxes for remote purchases. This just shifts who is responsible for the taxes to the retailer (if the taxing states opt-in, which requires them to adhere to certain tax streamlining provisions and other requirements that make the process simpler for retailers.)

This is a tax simplification and collection efficiency measure that doesn't change the amount of tax due on any sale.

> It's not make $1mm, it's sell $1mm.

Its not either. Its have over $1 million in remote sales in the prior year.

> At a 3-5% net profit, that's $30-50k/year before taxes, or so small you can't even hire a first employee yet.

Well, since net profit is after operating expenses (including labor costs), that's only "so small you can't even hire a first employee yet" if you expect the net value produced by that employee to be negative 30-50k per annum, in which case you it would be economically irrational to hire the employee even if you could afford it while remaining profitable. (While the numbers change, the general observation is true for any non-negative net profit amount: if you expect a positive return from an employee, you can "afford" to hire them -- and expect to be profitable afterwards -- anytime you have either a non-negative net profit, or a negative net profit that is smaller than the expected net value provided by the employee.)