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by michaelpinto
5408 days ago
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It was just a few weeks ago I was watching Steve Jobs give his pitch for Apple's new campus in California -- at one point Jobs broke out the idea that the benefit to the state was Apple paying their taxes. In other words the way a company is a good corporate citizen is by increasing the tax base. What's sad here is that Jobs was talking about payroll tax, not even sales tax. The right thing for Amazon to do is to collect that tax instead of cheating the kids of California. Also special deals for big companies (be it Amazon or Walmart) are always unfair to small companies that don't get the same breaks. If you're going to give a sales tax holiday to anyone it should be startup companies in California that can use the boost. |
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With that said, state sales tax has always been about collecting tax if the business has a presence in the state. This works for Amazon all the way down to the mom and pop that sells across the internet to people in another state.
Most (all?) states have a line item on their tax forms where the tax payer can write in a value on items they purchased out of state and need to pay taxes on. I'm guessing very few people fill that line in. It touches on another problem that no one wants to pay taxes (they always want someone else to pay), yet they want more and more services from the government.