Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdhgaiojfsa | Hacker News Reader

This is good news for the country, even if it's bad for my wallet. The prior state of affairs was absurd. Online retailers already have major advantages in terms of convenience and inventory. Getting a N% discount vs. brick and mortar by not charging taxes was completely unnecessary.

View on HN

Exposing consumers to more regressive sales taxes is in no way good for the country. What would be good for the country is to abolish sales taxes entirely.

Exactly; sales taxes generally just hurt the poor and middle class. A good case could be made for consumption taxes on luxury items, but taxing things like food and inexpensive consumer items (like non-luxury clothing) simply hurts poorer people while not significantly affecting wealthier ones.

Food is already exempt from sales tax. Take Ohio as a rough average for the country, here's the list of exemptions.

https://www.tax.ohio.gov/faq/tabid/6315/Default.aspx?Questio...

The problem with consumption taxes is it just starts a debate over what is considered necessary/unnecessary. I think you would be better off exempting people rather than classes of items.

> Food is already exempt from sales tax.

From some sales taxes. That is far from universal.

>Food is already exempt from sales tax.

Wrong. Come here to Virginia and try it. Or any Southern state for that matter.

Note: In Virginia, groceries are taxed, but at a lower rate than the normal sales tax.

No, not everywhere.

Cleaning up a loophole that evens the playing ground for different types of businesses is a good thing. If you have a problem with sales tax or taxation in general that's a different issue.

States not having jurisdiction outside of their borders isn't exactly a loophole. If California wants to punish people for buying from Oregon, a state free from sales taxes, it should use its existing use tax and take it up with its own citizens. This ruling is saying that California can tell Oregon businesses what to do.

Sure, but there's no point in getting bogged down in strict adherence to jurisdiction when we're all one country. Would you feel better if the ruling was that an online retailer in Oregon has to get a business license in every state which would come with the same requirement to collect sales tax? Same effect, but now businesses have to do more paperwork.

If we're all one country, how did the President get elected when the majority of the country voted for someone else?

..and yes, I'd prefer that the ruling was that the online retailer had to get a business license in every state. That ruling would create such a torches and pitchforks situation from citizens suddenly having their lives disrupted that we'd quickly return to status quo.

I mean even if we lived under a monarchy we would still be one country, the two things aren't really related.

That is the worst possible reason to enact a law. It should be obvious why making people's lives worse purposefully for political posturing is a bad idea, and you run the risk of your plan backfiring and having to live forever in the now-worse world.

This isn't enacting a law, though. This is changing the interpretation of the constitution. Prior to this, the interpretation was that the framers' intent was for citizens to be governed by the laws of their own state, now it's not. Let the chips fall where they may.

I don't think the distinction between legislative and common law is really meaningful in this case. A judge making a decision in a case like this is bringing a new law into existence.

Suppose I the owner of a small retailer based out of Oregon but have a location in Ohio. Should I be exempt from collecting sales tax simply because my company is registered and HQ'd in Oregon? The previous ruling was no, Ohio has the right to require my company to collect sales tax for sales in Ohio, but the ruling required that my company have a physical presence in the state. All that happened today was that the requirement to be physically present was dropped.

I mean the law is fairly narrowly scoped and certainly doesn't give states a blank check to write laws for citizens of other states.

Interesting. One thing I've noticed is that certain on-line sellers exempt purchases to certain states. I wonder how long before they start exempting residents of states that force online sales tax collection.

"What would be good for the country is to abolish sales taxes entirely."

In favor of what, exactly? Don't pretend that sales taxes could just be abolished, and states would just go without that revenue. Kansas tried gutting their tax revenue; it failed miserably.

Progressive income taxes, or property taxes.

The most reasonable and fair replacement would be land value taxes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

It’s good for big business and bad for small businesses because compliance will be tough, and harder to compete and price.

And this is why everyone should be supporting a federal VAT instead. If I'm not mistaken, Amazon had a similar argument a few years ago.

I'd be all for a federal VAT over federal income tax. But that wouldn't remove any of the state or local sales taxes.

A VAT would NEVER be a replacement, it would only be an addition. No thank you.

Yes. But it is too late. AMZN has already wiped out all local retail. AMZN not enforcing local taxes was a huge win - in the early days.

Yeah, but the irony is that Amazon can't compete with its own marketplace a lot of times now that they're collecting tax.

The prime markup with tax is almost always more expensive than the 3rd-party seller without.

In most cases, I much prefer to buy the Prime product at a small markup. I'm confident that it'll get there faster and that Amazon will stand behind it if there's something wrong.

I hate dealing with individual sellers on Amazon, and I really don't think I'm alone in that.

The unintended consequence may be to drive business offshore. The de minimis import duty was quadrupled to $800 a few years ago (meaning no duty while US retailers pay duty buying in bulk and incorporate into the US price) and this could be yet another advantage handed to sellers outside the country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com