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Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

I'm always suspicious of things happening on April 1st.

Regarding Amazon collecting taxes, they started doing it in my state earlier this year, and I've found that I hardly buy anything from Amazon anymore.

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>I'm always suspicious of things happening on April 1st.

It's not like that is the first day of a new fiscal quarter...

And for those who remember that far back, Gmail was launched on the 1st of April.

Apple was started on April 1, 1976.

A lot of fake news is propagated on April 1st each year, particularly in the tech industry, so there is justifiable reason to view April 1st announcements with a bit of skepticism.

Amazon has a subtle sense of humor.

I guess you were illegally leaving all the use tax off your tax returns then.

So you either don't buy much online, buy only from one place (that can provide a nice end of year report), or hire a bookkeeper to keep track of it, because the burden of calculating use tax otherwise would be extremely high.

Absolutely! If my state isn't going to come after me for use tax, which they don't, I'm not paying it. I don't believe it is just for the government to steal the rewards of my labor at every turn, so I protest excessive taxation in any way I can.

If you want to roll over and let the government pillage the rewards of your labor in every conceivable way, both coming and going, that is your prerogative; however, it is not one I share.

Where do you buy from instead?

I take it you were evading use tax before; or were your purchases really so small/infrequent as not to be subject to use tax in your state? Did you even check?

In Massachusetts it doesn't matter how small it is; you're still subject to the use tax. Of course it's practically impossible to verify and very few people even have accurate records.

So are you saying that you log all of your online purchases, filtering out those that already witholdings tax and remit use tax? Because for me, the burden of keeping track of that would be rather high.

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