11–20 of 83 posts
The push to tax Amazon is so online and brick-and-mortars are treated equally in a tax sense. Yet the states that have enacted taxes on Amazon, do not collect taxes unanimously from all businesses selling online within their borders. It seems to me that states need to find a new method to treat all online sales equally as well, and not separate Amazon into its own tax bracket. Is each company that faces a legislature…
Our data consist of daily transactions for 2,807,476 households from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013, and include both banking (i.e., checking, savings, and debit card) and credit card transactions. We observe the date, amount, and description of each transaction.
I'm a little disturbed that they had access to complete transaction information for roughly 2% of American households. Is it common practice for banks to share this data? Surely date + amount + description is personally identifiable in many situations.
Honestly, Amazon has a lot to offer even beyond "No Tax". And I say this as a Canadian who has had to pay taxes and duties on amazon orders since day 1. People may gripe about it for a bit... but amazon is still the best way to shop, and also has the best selection and prices.
I'll gladly pay an additional 6-10% to keep avoiding Wal-mart or Target or even Home Depot. There are people like me who just really hate having to suit up and go shopping. I don't like the traffic, I don't like getting ripped off, and I don't find in-store shopping a fun or magical experience like some do. I can pull up Amazon and read ratings/reviews, see what kind of problems people ran into with products, and mak…
Is this intractable?
> Amazon supports federal legislation that would explicitly let states require tax collections by all online retailers above a certain size. This would give Amazon a huge competitive advantage (given their existing infrastructure). Of course they support this.
It's similar to Walmart's minimum wage support. If Walmart were against minimum wage increases, their opponents would lambast them for it. If they're in favor of it, they get accused of only being in favor of it because they know they can more easily afford it compared to smaller retailers.
The push to tax Amazon is so online and brick-and-mortars are treated equally in a tax sense. Yet the states that have enacted taxes on Amazon, do not collect taxes unanimously from all businesses selling online within their borders. It seems to me that states need to find a new method to treat all online sales equally as well, and not separate Amazon into its own tax bracket. Is each company that faces a legislature…
The problem is taxes are incredibly complicated. There are companies that do "tax as a service"[1]. Governments should pass tax laws in some sort of industry standard tax rules specification[2]. This way, companies and the open source world can write rules engines to process taxes and online stores can pick among the competitors, not having to worry about the complexities themselves. Costs are reduced, competition in…
http://www.marketplacefairness.org/
It requires each state that wants to collect from foreign sellers to provide a uniform state-wide sales tax policy, a single organization in each state to handle registrations/filings/audits, and free tax compliance software. It also builds a mechanism to certify companies (like Avalara) to take care of internet sales tax for you, and relieves businesses of liability for mistakes if they use one of these companies to compute/file their taxes.
> Amazon supports federal legislation that would explicitly let states require tax collections by all online retailers above a certain size. This would give Amazon a huge competitive advantage (given their existing infrastructure). Of course they support this.
They get hit with flack coming or going. If they're against online taxes, then they're accused of not doing their fair share to support government coffers, or they're accused of getting an unfair competitive advantage (per offline retailers). It's similar to Walmart's minimum wage support. If Walmart were against minimum wage increases, their opponents would lambast them for it. If they're in favor of it, they get ac…