Amazon strikes back at "internet tax"

[kjack]

Next logical step would be to force on-line retailers to collect any city and county sales taxes...

[dk3dknight]

Do not forget the rules...

If it moves tax it,
if it keeps moving tax it till it stops moving,
if it stops moving subsidize it.

[Lord_Stewie]

Originally Posted by AlexCruz

Let's just make the Internet the 51st state lol.

+1

[rangers85]

Originally Posted by dialog_gvf

So, how much will it cost Amazon and all other online retailers to make changes to their cart software?

Oh, and does NY want the money sent to them? How does that happen? Magic? No, that happens by changes to accounting (more costs). Accountants managing the process. Complicating the books and their tax returns. And someone needs to actually send the money to NY state every quarter.

How much will it cost the vendors to do NY state's collection job for them?

Now, imagine this catches on and you're an online vendor suddenly having to account for and remit to 50 different states every month or quarter.

And how much will the governments spend to deal with possibly tens of thousands of these new sales tax remissions? No doubt they'll pat themselves on the back for creating more civil service jobs.

Gary

Devil's advocate would say, how much is it costing Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart etc to collect the state's sales taxes for them. Really this is no different than any other business. Walmart, etc all collect taxes for the states in which they operate, they then turn around and either monthly or yearly cut a check to the state in the amount of taxes they collected.

[Ferris]

Originally Posted by rangers85

Devil's advocate would say, how much is it costing Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart etc to collect the state's sales taxes for them. Really this is no different than any other business. Walmart, etc all collect taxes for the states in which they operate, they then turn around and either monthly or yearly cut a check to the state in the amount of taxes they collected.

The cost being mentioned by dialog_gvf is not the regular cost of collection, but the initial cost to build a system, adjust the bookkeeping procedures, update their existing purchase system (DB changes, etc), and UI, among other things.

With respect to other merchants, they followed this process from the outset. This means when they established their company & storefronts, local/state/federal tax laws were considered. This is not the case with amazon. Retrofitting all of your books takes A LOT of time and effort. This is a very expensive venture for a company to do this. Where does that cost for doing this go? To the consumer. So, this means not only are you paying taxes for something you didn't used to, but the prices of many items will go up, causing amazon to be less competetive, and provide less pressure to other merchants to keep their prices down.

While people may think this will "hurt" amazon, it won't... that pain just gets passed on to all of us.