391–400 of 613 posts
1) A US based warehouse/shipping company. 2) An offshore entity that owns the products and sells them - but the products never leave the US.
Company 2 sells the products to consumer, company 1 ships them. Company 2 is, presumably, beyond the enforceable jurisdiction of the states and therefore can't be forced to pay the taxes?
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Exactly; sales taxes generally just hurt the poor and middle class. A good case could be made for consumption taxes on luxury items, but taxing things like food and inexpensive consumer items (like non-luxury clothing) simply hurts poorer people while not significantly affecting wealthier ones.
Food is already exempt from sales tax. Take Ohio as a rough average for the country, here's the list of exemptions. https://www.tax.ohio.gov/faq/tabid/6315/Default.aspx?Questio... The problem with consumption taxes is it just starts a debate over what is considered necessary/unnecessary. I think you would be better off exempting people rather than classes of items.
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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…
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…
I would love someone to at least make the case -- it seems like a non-partisan thing, surely the free market types should be in favor of price transparency, while liberals should be against misleading consumers.
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Honestly, the state doesn't expect anyone to get this completely right except the largest companies. If you make a good faith effort to comply with laws, in the vast majority of cases, you're fine.
No! Selective enforcement is terrible, if there's a revenue threshold bake it into the law, otherwise you'll see large companies crying foul on some up-and-coming competitor that then gets bogged down in legislation, along with all the other terrible thing inherit in selectively enforced laws.
There's no real winning there either. If you bake the threshold into the law, some companies may game the system such that, if the cost of total compliance is x, and we're revenue range of x, give or take, to just take a little less money to stay under the threshold.
Not that I'm suggesting that is something that we should care about, or even consider a majority worry, but hard and fast cliffs lead to gamesmanship, or worse, misaligned incentives (such that it's non-beneficial for those on welfare to work if it puts them over a given benefits threshold.)
On the whole, I agree that selective enforcement is bad, if not wholly terrible, but its absence isn't a panacea either.
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Yep. The most annoying part is that tax jurisdictions don't correspond to ZIP codes. If they did, this would be so much easier.
That's because zip codes don't really align with anything in the general case. There are even zip codes that span multiple states. https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/53918/determining-wh...
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See [1]. Sales tax as a service is available from seven different providers. Shopping cart integration is available. You pay one bill, they handle the rest. [1] http://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/
So this is another needless regulation that creates more useless rent-seekers?
What no one is talking about here is how this would be handled, especially for a small online sellers. There are almost 10,000 tax jurisdictions ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/mccon... ) and you're not allowed to collect sales tax unless you register for that jurisdiction. There is also a fee collected by most jurisdictions to register and most make you send in periodic reports, even if you…
suddenly the EU VAT system looks awesome :-)
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>here’s zero national economic gain from _any_ variation in law from state to state Yes there is. States compete with each other and this prevents any one of them from having laws that are much crappier and more oppressive than average because when that happens businesses and people leave.
So competition might prevent one of many downsides to different states having different laws? I don't see why this means there's any benefit to that situation over just having one set of laws?
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Paying sales taxes online for the one state where I have a business that does retail sales takes between 10 and 30 minutes, depending on how complex that quarter's sales were. Multiply by 50 states, and it's up to 25 hours a month of work. For those of you who have never done this, sales taxes are a lot more complicated than they seem. In the three states where I've had retail businesses, different types of products…
Or you could just outsource it to companies like TaxJar that specialize in this and pay a few bucks to have to all done automatically. After this ruling I expect more and more platforms will have this sort of thing built in. One or two more fields to fill out for your products, but otherwise completely automated.
Imagine if filing your personal tax return was, by law, so complicated that it was impossible for an individual to do it without hiring H&R Block -- that would be bogus. And to many of us, it seems awfully similar to what's happening here.
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Honestly, the state doesn't expect anyone to get this completely right except the largest companies. If you make a good faith effort to comply with laws, in the vast majority of cases, you're fine.
No! Selective enforcement is terrible, if there's a revenue threshold bake it into the law, otherwise you'll see large companies crying foul on some up-and-coming competitor that then gets bogged down in legislation, along with all the other terrible thing inherit in selectively enforced laws.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf