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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

State taxes should discriminate against in-state retailers, since people who live in the state are the ones that vote on the taxes. That's how laws should and do work: county property taxes discriminate against property owners in that county, speed limits apply to drivers on that road, etc.

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The analogy doesn't hold. If I live just across the border from a dominos pizza and they deliver me a pizza the driver has to obey the speed limit but somehow according to this case he gets to ignore the sales tax of my state?

Sales tax looks like it should be charged at the physical point of the transaction. If Amazon creates a store in my living room through the magic of the internet that's a transaction that happens in my living room and should probably be subject to my state's sales tax.

"If Amazon creates a store in my living room through the magic of the internet"

Why should that count as "creating a store", when taking telephone orders or sending out mail-order catalogs doesn't?

I suppose the argument is that taking phone or postal orders should count, but never has, because it wasn't worth it to try to collect those taxes.

There have, in fact, been attempts to collect similar taxes in the past. They were always shot down by the courts.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us...

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us...

Your decision to place the transaction in your living room is completely arbitrary. Sure, you're buying from your living room, but they're selling from another state.

It's not so much where the transaction takes place (they'd have a difficult time determining that) but more about where the delivery takes place.

So, what if I live in California and buy a gift online from a company in Washington and have it shipped to my parents in Ohio?

You would pay the sales tax for the zip code in which your parents live. The same way you do when you give your zip code to a clerk at a department store.

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