Notice how you did not once consider how tax-free and low overhead of internet business is a massive boom to citizens and merchants alike. Instead, you bemoan the injustice that wealth cannot be syphoned away to feed bloated goverment welfare and warfare.
You are a a statist shill, Mr. Zelinsky. May your collar never chafe.

Our TaxCloud sales tax-as-a-service, which will be available later this year, will be offered at no charge to merchants, to facilitate collection and compliance.

Our TaxCloud service (currently undergoing state-by-state certification under the SSUTA) automatically calculates and remits state, regional, local, and special jurisdictional taxes (again at zero cost to merchants). Also per the SSUTA, TaxCloud automatically manages exemptions (entity-based, item-based, and calendar-based), and also prepares Simplified Electronic Returns to each taxing jurisdiction. We are working toward implementing TaxCloud for all SSUTA and non-SSUTA states alike (except, of course, the states that do not collect sales tax).

We are building TaxCloud because we firmly believe that our local communities deserve the funds which were anticipated when voters approved their respective local initiatives for public services and projects. We also know that a well designed and implemented web service could be easily integrated with existing online “shopping cart” software and point-of-sale systems.

You can see a preliminary demonstration of TaxCloud calculating tax rates for thousands of state and local tax jurisdictions at http://myrate.taxcloud.net . As states, counties or transportation districts update their rates, TaxCloud and all TaxCloud merchants get the change automatically, and maintain compliance with all local sales tax laws.

It is time to tell ALL Internet merchants (not just Amazon.com) to start collecting and remitting local sales tax, just like the corner store has to. Stop pretending that the transaction is “tax-free” because Use tax is still due.

Your local sales tax should be collected & remitted for you by all merchants, so businesses and individuals don’t have to meticulously keep track of all out-of-state transactions.

R. David L. Campbell
Chief Executive
The Federal Tax Authority ( http://Fed-Tax.net )

Look, simply saying “it’s not fair” doesn’t make this an open and shut case. Consumers have benefitted from the absence of an online sales tax but is that REALLY so horrible given the dire straits many are in over the past few years due to bad economic policy and decision-making by govermnment leaders?

Fact: every idea to date that has sought to add an internet sales tax has been more trouble than it is worth. In New York, their solution was to force retailers themselves to find a way to collect the sales tax from online transactions, and the burden and cost of collection itself was to be put on those retailers as well. Basically, the lawmakers in Albany want your tax revenue, they just don’t want to do anything themselves to collect it. How is that a sensible solution?

An online sales tax may or may not be a good idea but implementing one simply for the sake of fairness, without really delving into the cause and effect, is stupid.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by oupblog: Edward Zelinsky thinks that next year we should tax Internet sales:http://bit.ly/4EzRG1…

R. David L. Campbell
Chief Executive
The Federal Tax Authority (http://Fed-Tax.net)

We agree completely that the so-called “Affiliate Taxes” are an unequal and innapropriate mechanism for taxation (which we have detailed on our blog at http://blog.fed-tax.net/2009/07/20/complexnexus/). A significant concern surrounding such legislation is that it could be interpreted to include any direct response mechanism (or for that matter, any contractual relationship) as it blurs the historical “bright-line” test of physical presence to determine substantial nexus.

The Main Street Fairness Act will finally mature efforts which has been underway for the last ten years called the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (or SSUTA). SSUTA has been developed collectively by 44 states, along with industry groups and retailers, in an effort to simplify and modernize state-by-state sales tax codes to eliminate the overly burdensome “entanglements” cited by the US Supreme Court opinions from 1967 (Bellas Hess) and again in 1992 (Quill). Complete details about SSUTA are available at their website, http://www.streamlinedsalestax.org.

We maintain that with basic application of modern technology with SSUTA simplified rules and procedures, systems within e-commerce websites could easily calculate (and collect, and remit) accurate local destination-based sales tax, using techniques akin to real-time shipping calculation – a feature frequently a part of most modern web purchasing experiences today.

Thank you again for your thoughtfully considered post, and we look forward to the day when ALL merchants are collecting and remitting local sales tax.

R. David L. Campbell
Chief Executive
The Federal Tax Authority (Fed-Tax.net)