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.

Joseph Bishop-Henchman at the Tax Foundation thinks this decision sets up a new political fight in Congress and in the states:

All eyes will now turn to Congress and the states. Congress has been stymied between alternate versions of federal solutions: the Remote Transactions Parity Act (RTPA) or Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), which lets states collect if they agree to simplify their sales taxes, and a proposal from retiring Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that would make the sales tax a business obligation rather than a consumer obligation, and have it collected based on the tax rate where the company is located but send the revenue to the jurisdiction where the customer is located. RTPA and MFA are more workable and more likely to pass, but Goodlatte controls what makes it to the House floor, so nothing has happened. Maybe today’s decision will change that.

Berin Szoka at TechFreedom noted:

For the last twenty-six years, the Internet has flourished because of the legal certainty created by Quill. Now, no retailer can know whether it must collect taxes, and smaller retailers face huge challenges. As Chief Justice Roberts notes, the majority ‘breezily disregards the costs that its decision will impose on retailers.’ The majority insists that software will fix the problem of calculating the correct state and local sales tax for every transaction, but with over 10,000 jurisdictions taxing similar products differently, the problem is nightmarishly complicated.

My colleague Doug Holtz-Eakin explains the tension:

What is the economic upshot of this decision? Certainly, it puts in-state and brick-and-mortar retailers on a level playing field with online sellers. In isolation, that is an improvement in the efficiency of the economy because people will shop based on the product and experience and not the tax consequences. Recall, however, that in many states a resident is liable for the “use tax” on her out-of-state purchases. If the sales tax is now being collected, it will be important for states either to drop the use tax or to make sure that there is no double taxation in some other way. If not, then the result of this decision will be less efficiency.

Another aspect of the decision is the impact on federalism and the notion of representation. The decision means that South Dakota can now dictate some of the business operations of firms that have no representation in the South Dakota legislature. Is that fair? Moreover, firms can no longer shop among states to find the sales tax regime that they like best — they will be subject to the same sales taxes across the country regardless of where they operate.

Grover Norquist at American for Tax Reform had this to say:

Today the Supreme Court said ‘yes—you can be taxed by politicians you do not elect and who act knowing you are powerless to object.’ This power can now be used to export sales taxes, personal and corporate income taxes, and opens the door for the European Union to export its tax burden onto American businesses—as they have been demanding…

We fought the American Revolution in large part to oppose the very idea of taxation without representation. Today, the Supreme Court announced, ‘oops’ governments can now tax those outside their borders—those who have no political power, no vote, no voice.

Adam Michel of the Heritage Foundation also focused on federalism at The Daily Signal:

The new status quo under Wayfair is untenable, creating a Wild West for state sales taxes. Some will point to seemingly easy solutions that have been promoted for decades. One example is the Remote Transactions Parity Act, sponsored by Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D.

Noem’s bill would maintain the new expanded power of state tax collectors, while imposing nominal limits and simplifications on states’ tax rules.

Such proposals that force sellers to track their sales to the consumer’s destination and comply with laws in other jurisdictions are fundamentally at odds with the principles of local government and American federalism.

Rob Port is concerned about the interstate commerce implications:

The purpose of the interstate commerce clause is to prevent the nightmare of fifty states squabbling with one another over trade wars between their constituent industries, or trying to exert political influence on one another. Congress, and not the states, is to regulate interstate commerce.

I feel like the Supreme Court, by overturning Quill and giving the states new powers to tax beyond their borders, has weakened interstate commerce protections and cracked open the lid to a real can of worms.

All Things SCOTUS has a list of reactions from conservatives.

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:

Bringing greater uniformity to the current system may have some positive benefits, such as more straightforward tax administration, but it would come at the expense of tax competition between the states and localities. Moreover, when supporters of the [SSTP] argue for greater uniformity in the sales tax system, they may just be making a covert effort to sustain higher tax rates and expand the current system to incorporate remote vendors on interstate goods and services. But at what cost? The states are essentially proposing to abandon true federalism and jurisdictional tax competition in exchange for the power to potentially recoup a small amount of tax revenue from interstate sales through a uniform system of third-party tax collection. Sadly, it appears that state and local officials would prefer to create a cozy tax cartel instead of relying on a “laboratories of democracy” model of competition between the states. Many analysts have labeled the SSTP proposal “collusive federalism” or “cartel federalism,” because it runs counter to America’s true federalist structure of government and has very little to do with protecting states’ rights. In fact, if a state wants to simplify its sales tax base, it can do so and does not need to reach an agreement with other states.  Federalism is about state independence, not state collusion.

That’s why Congress should never cede taxing authority over interstate commerce to state or local governments. Of course, the Founders taught us this years ago when the tossed out the Articles of Confederation in favor of our current Constitution. They realized federalism was a two-sided coin, and while the states should be left with broad discretion to craft their own tax policies, that authority must end at the state border.  It must so that a free-trade pact among the states can work and interstate commerce can flow freely.  The SSTP would sabotage that.

That doesn’t mean that there is no way for states to constitutionally tax online sales.  As Michael Graham notes, there is an easier solution that would be pro-constitutional and pro-tax competition: An “origin-based” taxing rule:

The fair and obvious solution is to treat every Internet purchase like an ice cream cone on Hampton Beach. The Ben and Jerry’s guy there doesn’t ask where you’re from. For every dollar of ice cream he sells, he collects the same sales tax, period. Why not have Internet retailers do the same? If a business in New Hampshire sells a product, online or at the drive-thru, it always collects the local sales tax. It’s fair — after all, that business and its workers use services the taxes support. And it’s easy — every business already knows how much to collect.

Here’s how Aaron Lukas and I described an origin-based taxing system in a 2001 Cato article:

Most people don’t realize it, but nothing is stopping states from “leveling the playing field” on sales taxes. Each state has the legal authority to tax all transactions that originate within its borders (i.e., an “origin-based” tax). But no state chooses to tax sales that in-state businesses make to out-of-state buyers. In other words, states purposefully exempt their exports from sales taxes. So why don’t states treat all merchants the same by having them collect the local sales tax regardless of where the buyer lives? When you walk into Wal-Mart, checkout clerks don’t ask you where you live; they collect the taxes due where the store is located. We could treat Internet sellers that way. But states fear that a few low- and no-tax rogue states might lure businesses away. Politicians call that a “race to the bottom.”  But it’s really just healthy tax competition.

An origin-based taxing methodology would also have the important added benefit of protecting buyer / taxpayer privacy.  There’s no need for extensive data-collection and reporting requirements that would have to accompany a destination-based taxing rule, as required under the SSTP.

Federal lawmakers should reject the SSTP proposal as an anti-competitive, unconsitutitonal nightmare for our Republic.  If states want to “simplify” their sales tax codes, then by all means, go for it.  But there is no need for Congress to grant them power to extend those taxes outside their borders or, worse yet, do it in unison with other tax officials as part of an interstate tax cartel.   Tax competition must trump tax collusion.