Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Yesterday, the Supreme Court dropped a decision in Wayfair v. South Dakota, a case on the issue of online sales tax. As always, the holding is key: “Because the physical presence rule of Quill is unsound and incorrect, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U. S. 298, and National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue of Ill., 386 U. S. 753, are overruled.” What follows below is a roundup of reactions and comments to the decision. Continue reading →
A Texas tax official estimates in this story that Texas loses an estimated $600 million in Internet sales taxes every year. Its part of a long-running debate about whether state governments should be able to collect taxes from out-of-state retailers who send goods into their jurisdictions.
What happens with the $600 million depends on what you mean by “Texas.” If you mean the government of the state of Texas in Austin, why, yes, the government appears not to collect that amount, which it wants to. If by “Texas” you mean the people who live, work, and raise their families throughout the state—Texans—they actually save $600 million a year. They get to do what they want with it. After all, it’s their money.
The Texas tax collector is complaining because the last thing state taxing agents want to do is collect money on in the form of use taxes, which means something like going door to door to collect money from voters based on what they bought from out-of-state. Revenuers intensely prefer to hide the process, collecting their residents’ money from out-of-state companies.
Amazon.com is Texas’ target—it’s the great white whale for tax-hungry jurisdictions nationwide. With no retail outlets and few offices or fulfillment centers around the country, it’s not subject to tax jurisdiction in lots of places that would like to tap it for revenue. Having a fulfillment center in Texas may make Amazon liable for $600 million of its customers’ money, so it’s doing the sensible thing: getting out.
And thank heavens it can! Amazon is a cog in the extremely virtuous process of tax competition. Its ability to move operations means that it can escape states with burdensome taxes and tax collections oblibations, like Texas. Tax competition among states puts downward pressure on taxes, which in turn puts upward pressure on the wealth and well-being of state residents.
The pro-tax folks have been working for years to eliminate tax competition. The “Streamlined Sales Tax Project” continues work it began in 2000 to pave the way for nationwide sales taxation. “Streamlining” sounds so good, doesn’t it? But the result would be uniform—and uniformly high—sales taxes that every state might impose on every retailer that sends goods across state lines.
The Web site of the pro-tax coalition sounds good, too: the “Alliance for Main Street Fairness,” at the URL standwithmainstreet.com. Who wouldn’t want to “stand with Main Street”? Lovers of limited government, for one.
“Fairness” here means uniform high sales taxes and interstate tax collection obligations. The site doesn’t say who’s behind it, but the campaign to impose taxes on Amazon and other remote sellers is almost certainly a project of big national chain retailers. Rather than fight to lower taxes nationwide, they think they should just saddle their online competitors with tax collection obligations.
As long as the Streamlined Sales Tax Project continues to fail, tax competition in this area survives, and retailers like Amazon can provide lower costs to all of us—including that $600 million in savings enjoyed by Texans each year.
There’s a movement afoot in Congress to advance legislation that would eviscerate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, empower a state-based tax cartel, and potentially decimate the Internet economy in the process. Business Week has the details:
In the next week, legislators are expected to introduce bills in the House and Senate promising to do away with the “physical presence” requirement. If a bill passes — and that’s a big “if” — it would require all online retailers, except for the tiniest companies, to collect sales taxes in the 23 states that are part of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project. The states would compensate the retailers for the trouble, while promising not to sue them for tax collection mistakes that are made.
The Streamlined Sales Tax Project, or “SSTP”, sounds good in theory but would be disastrous in practice. Michael Graham of the Boston Herald penned an editorial about the SSTP today and he does a nice job pointing out why, when it comes to “tax simplification,” the devil is always in the details and those details are typically anything but “simple” (or taxpayer-friendly for that matter).
The real danger of the SSTP, however, is what it means for the Constitution and tax competition among the states. In this 2003 paper I penned with Veronique de Rugy for the Cato Institute, we showed why the SSTP would not only fail to simplify the sales tax code, but would actually cede dangerous taxing powers to state and local governments over the interstate marketplace. In the process, Veronique and I argued, a multi-state sales tax cartel would be spawned: Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
