Fern
Elite Member
- Sep 30, 2003
- 26,907
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Once again, SCOTUS made no claim that Amazon should be competitively advantaged. If you believe this to be the case I encourage you to provide a quote from their opinion that says so. They spoke to tax law, not economics.
OK, perhaps I'm better understanding you now. When you originally said just "rationale", I didn't assume you meant an economic one.
And yes, SCOTUS' rationale was based on the Constitution.
As to any economic rationale, I tend you to agree with that there is none. But I'll state those in a separate post.
If you actually believe there are no legislative remedies to this you can't possibly be following this issue as closely as you claim. It appears that you believe I was advocating for state level remedies to this and structured a long argument against it for no reason. Perhaps you did not mean to create a straw man and simply misunderstood the argument.
I in no way ever argued any of the things you claimed.
I never said I followed it "closely". In fact I said "very casually". I have only a very few this issue applies to. To few to worry much about it until something happens.
As far as legislative fixes, I do not believe there are any easy ones out there. This sales tax issue has been in our literature for some years now. The decline in states' revenue since 2008 has only made it more prominent. It seems to me that coalition of maybe 30 states has been working with the federal govt for a solution to this for a number of years with no apparent success.
What is interesting is that the conservative economic position is for Amazon to pay sales taxes. Exempting them creates market distortions. This is in fact why there is no rational reason for their competitors to pay sales taxes and for them to not. ( and no, the fact that they are only a passthrough is totally irrelevant and you know it.)
Well, as a tax professional such details seem very relevant to me.
Fern
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