Posted by Bill Leonard at 12:00 am on Feb 22, 2010 Comments Off on Taxing Amazon is Government’s Conceit
On Thursday the California Senate passed a bill, ABX8 8 that
will make internet retailers with affiliates in California collect
sales tax on behalf of the state. The bill is now in the
Assembly for a vote on concurrence. Many good points were
raised in the debate. I completely agree with the Democrats
that there is a great inequity between internet retailers who sell
without collecting sales tax and California retailers who have to
collect the tax. However, this is a fight that cannot be won
because of the nature of the internet.
When Jeff Bezos was thinking about establishing Amazon back in
the ’90s, his first thought was to set up on an Indian
reservation. Bezos is a wonderful, mad genius, and his
sophistication has only increased. When New York passed
this same mandate on Amazon last year, Amazon immediately fired all
of its affiliates in New York and signed up new ones in a
neighboring state. You can call it radical, but it is a great
business decision that is in the best interest of Amazon
shareholders. Some say the answer is a national sales tax
program, but that misses the mark as well. Consider that
Google is rumored to be designing… Read More