Amazon joins Walmart in push for online sales tax(washingtonexaminer.com) |
Amazon joins Walmart in push for online sales tax(washingtonexaminer.com) |
Amazon joins Walmart in push for online sales tax not out of some newfound concern for "marketplace fairness," but because Amazon's business model is changing in such a way that now Amazon stands to benefit from this tax.
In order to provide faster shipping, Amazon is building warehouses throughout the country. These warehouses constitute a "physical presence," which requires them to collect sales taxes, in any event. So, if Amazon is going to have to collect sales taxes under the existing "physical presence" doctrine, it may as well try to expand online sales taxes to whack its smaller competitors who don't have a 50-state network of giant warehouses.
Sigh!
I live in NY where Amazon already collects sales tax so it doesn't really matter to me.
(I say this as a fan of Amazon -- I use them all the time and will continue to do so, but this is a purely shrewd corporate move and shouldn't be confused with making things fair).
Since Amazon has been growing its SaaS business for some time now one had to expect they were eventually going to want to make operating shopping cart checkout by yourself as tricky as possible. They might start lobbying municipalities to pile on the complications now that they're on the "right" side of this dispute.
This was always a red herring. Vertex (and presumably others, although I've only worked with Vertex) already maintains this database, and will help any company calculate taxes for a reasonable fee. Corporations with far lower revenues than Amazon have been taxing in many jurisdictions for decades.
I can't blame Amazon though, just looking out for themselves which is the same as the rest of us do.
I can't blame the lobbyists either, they're just looking out for themselves the same as the rest of us do.
I can blame the legislators. They're the ones with a monopoly on force wielded against us for their own gain.
I can blame the electorate. They're the ones granting the power and the legitimacy to the force wielded against us.
As much as it sucks, money is power.
I don't know who the hell to blame. It's the system man!
I've found myself using Fresh for basic things, which the vast majority are on amazon's normal site.
At least carbon taxes are better than cap'n'trade. That scheme is corruption on wheels. I actually wouldn't mind carbon taxes if I could believe that they would completely forestall cap'n'trade.
By definition a "free market" is free of government interference. A system created by and run by the government, with mandatory participation is about as anti-free market as it gets.
If a company can't opt-out of participation then it's not a free market.
Another aspect, perhaps more serious, is that it would be very difficult to audit incumbent carbon producers' use of carbon credits. These aren't physical items for which you can count inventory, nor are they currency which enters and leaves the corporation via double-entry bookkeeping; they are numbers on a spreadsheet that are credited and debited based on circumstances that have yet to be defined. Corporate executives may not be perfect stewards of shareholder interest, but they've never even thought of the stakeholders for carbon credits. Europe might not have had such problems, but my feeling is that our accountants aren't as honest or diligent as theirs are, and our corporations are governed differently.
Also, for years before the introduction of cap'n'trade, large polluters will have the incentive to remain large polluters, so they get the most credits they possibly can. This is why energy lobbyists love to promote cap'n'trade, and they won't complain about a decade of lead time for it.
1) Many existing polluters can't afford much of a limit, but we don't want them to go bankrupt, so every proposal offers tons of 'free' allowances, which will inevitably be allocated more by congressional pull than metrics. It also favors existing polluters and discourages new entrants, even though they may be cleaner than the existing market.
In Europe these free credits (and their unpredictability) caused the value of carbon prices to fluctuate wildly, which undermined parts of the program
2) <This criticism is stupid to me, but it gets around> - The credits will just turn into one more big derivatives market, and be engineered to obfuscate real polluting by clever gaming of the trading system.
These are definitely fixable issues, but it's reasonable to be worried that implementation may be so complicated that it has nasty unforeseen consequences, since setting up a new market and regulating it well is rarely easy.
A tax is just money going into the Treasury, plain and simple. Then you at least have a chance to curb corruption before the government spends it.
I understand now that it is much more complicated than that but I like the idea of what I thought it was.