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Comment by coreymgilmore | Hacker News Reader

The push to tax Amazon is so online and brick-and-mortars are treated equally in a tax sense. Yet the states that have enacted taxes on Amazon, do not collect taxes unanimously from all businesses selling online within their borders. It seems to me that states need to find a new method to treat all online sales equally as well, and not separate Amazon into its own tax bracket. Is each company that faces a legislature going to have to fight for its tax rate separately and work their won deals? This is ambiguous to buyers and hurts smaller businesses that don't have the legal funds or ability to negotiate.

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The problem is taxes are incredibly complicated. There are companies that do "tax as a service"[1].

Governments should pass tax laws in some sort of industry standard tax rules specification[2]. This way, companies and the open source world can write rules engines to process taxes and online stores can pick among the competitors, not having to worry about the complexities themselves. Costs are reduced, competition increased, and consumers win.

[1] http://www.avalara.com/

[2] this might also make taxes simpler. If legislators can't encode (compile) it, they can't legislate it!

That's basically the Marketplace Fairness Act, which is the most likely "internet sales tax" bill to pass in the near future.

http://www.marketplacefairness.org/

It requires each state that wants to collect from foreign sellers to provide a uniform state-wide sales tax policy, a single organization in each state to handle registrations/filings/audits, and free tax compliance software. It also builds a mechanism to certify companies (like Avalara) to take care of internet sales tax for you, and relieves businesses of liability for mistakes if they use one of these companies to compute/file their taxes.

For true fairness there needs to be a single organization nationally that can collect and process the tax. 50 different filings is an unduly onerous and inefficient hurdle for setting up shop.

That's what the certified companies are for. This one set up that site:

https://taxcloud.net/

They calculate and file your returns for you. They get paid a commission directly by the states for facilitating it, so they're free to businesses.

Unfortunetly the distrubuted nature of the political system acts aainst this its the same with emplyment having 53 diferent sets of employment laws is very ineficient.

From an outsiders perspective what the USA needs is a proper reform of the constitution and remove a lot of thinkgs from the perview of the individual states.

A maximum age for senators, congessmen and judges would also be a good thing.

So you are pro age discrimination is what you are saying.

There is already age discrimination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_Un...

And you can be tried as an adult at 15 or 16 years old, but you can't vote until you're 18. What kind of bullshit is that?

And you can join the army and fight for your country and be able to have a drink.

Short term limits and a required popular vote to adjust congressional pay would be a better idea that an upper age limit.

Most higher-level politicians are independently wealthy. Lowering congressional pay would just serve to further weed out non-super-affluent candidates. I guess it depends on how you like your politics, so I won't pass judgement either way.

Short term limits means you put more power in the hands of the civil service it takes at least 1 full electoral cycle to understand how it all really works.

If it were up to me I'd just can the sales tax on the brick and mortar stores as well. There is always some spending you can cut somewhere.

"Some spending" is a bit of an understatement — sales taxes represent the single largest revenue source for state governments other than "transfers from the federal government"[1].

[1] http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...

>It seems to me that states need to find a new method to treat all online sales equally as well, and not separate Amazon into its own tax bracket

VAT works fine once you have the infrastructure in place.

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