I'll support this just as soon as B&M retailers are required to find out where their customers live and collect sales taxes accordingly as well.
Right now, from a municipal funding perspective, homes with children are revenue negative, homes without children are roughly revenue neutral, office/industry is profitable, and retail is VERY profitable. (all this is before you take into account tax incentives for relocation/retention.)
Why will cities fight over a mall, or a car dealership, or a corporate headquarters? A mall draws in shoppers from far beyond municipal borders and the (local part of the) sales tax stays with the physical location. When you pay tax on a new car, you're paying multiple years worth of sales tax on driving in one go. If you buy a car in a different city than where you live, it's like if you shopped in that city every single week for the entire time you own the car. Offices are the same as malls in that they draw from beyond municipal boundaries.
If all of a citizen's sales taxes went to the city they lived in, as opposed to where they shopped, then you'd see local (or at least small scale, localized) commerce boom because no city would want to deal with the traffic, road construction and maintenance costs, etc that come with huge retail developments.
Dude, this is blowing my mind. This will be a blog post soon.
So why can't it apply the same way to online merchants? Where their business is located?
You obviously don't run an online store. It's not as easy as just charging them tax. There are so many different tax rates (that are constantly changing btw) that it's going to be very difficult for any small retailer to keep this up-to-date.
It would be much easier to just require the customer to claim it on their tax forms (which I believe is already a requirement).
To claim this is "lost revenue" is about the same as when the RIAA claims piracy is lost revenue.
Do you go after 300 million people or do you go after 10s of thousands?
This is a problem with your states, not with the general idea that in the US the internet retailers are getting away with helping people avoid sales tax at the moment.
This was inevitable, if you didn't see it coming you're a fool.
Also this type of 'problem' is easily automated by computers, you're just going to have to pay for it.
Amazon is able to handle the import duties for dozens and dozens of countries, each of which have complex rules that depend heavily on the actual product. Sales tax is strictly easier than what they are already doing, and saying that it is too complex for them to handle is simply absurd.