Another Broken Promise: Trump Taxes The Internet
Sound the alarm! Our government overlords have now granted themselves the authority to further extort one of the last bastions of freedom: the internet.
In a monumental ruling overturning nearly 50 years of legal precedent, the US Supreme Court has given states the power to tax online retailers.
Originally, internet companies were somewhat sheltered from taxation thanks to an old law that “barred states from imposing sales taxes on most purchases their residents make from out-of-state retailers.”
But now, under the rule of “low-taxes, pro-business” Trump, we’re entering a new era of statism.
No dystopian nation-state is complete, of course, without some classic Orwellian doublespeak.
On April 17th, Trump tweeted: "Employment is up, Taxes are DOWN. Enjoy!"
But then, on June 21st, he tweeted: "Big Supreme Court win on internet sales tax - about time! Big victory for fairness and for our country. Great victory for consumers and retailers."
Can someone ask President Business how exactly do consumers win when our goods and services now cost much more thanks to legalized theft (taxes)?
What’s even worse is, the real horror show could be coming soon for online retailers who now face mind-numbingly complex tax requirements and potentially rising debts.
Take, for example, Laurence Kotlikoff, who owns a small internet business and recently aired his frustrations in a Forbes op-ed titled, Did The Supreme Court Potentially Bankrupt Tens Of Thousands Of Small Online Businesses?
Laurence has spent the last 25 years dreading this ruling. Paying his extortion fees to the state were always bad enough, but it was the additional costs of hiring financial experts to handle the process that really racked up the price tag---to $50,000 per year! Ouch.
“$50,000 a year is a huge sum for a small company,” writes Laurence, “especially one like mine that is investing every penny it earns to grow and just breaking even.
“Based on the Supreme Court decision, my company's tax compliance bill as opposed to tax bill could easily come to $150,000…”
The new ruling follows a long trend of contradictions and anti-free market rhetoric from Trump, who on one end hails the wonders of lowering taxes, while simultaneously describing tax hikes as a “victory for consumers.”
The statist argument is that shopping malls and traditional brick-and-mortar retailers---who never really got to avoid taxes---may see a more level playing field against internet companies.
However, you don’t fix extortion by legitimizing the mafia and making everyone a victim of it---get rid of extortion altogether so no one pays the statist bribe!
Indeed, that’s part of the reason so many consumers ditched their old physical stores for online retailers in the first place. Intuitively, people can sense the difference between having the government’s invisible enforcement gun to their head (taxation) and voluntarily trading in a more free, peaceful environment (the internet).
But, alas, these are strange times we live in. 2+2=5 and higher taxes are “a victory for consumers.”
Still, do not grieve, my fellow freedom-fighters. Cryptocurrencies offer us a way to buy and sell products and services without the state stealing profits from every transaction.
We here at TDV have worked tirelessly to educate minds and awaken souls, and change is spreading.
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As much as it may seem enjoyable, I hate saying “I told ya so.” Especially when it’s something I don’t want to be right about. But I told everyone Trump was going to be no different than Obama. Or Bush. Or Clinton. They’re all friends… and they’re all in the same gang.
In fact, Trump is so much like Barack Drone Bomber that he’s now earned his new nickname. Congratulations, Orangebama.
The same old left/right game continues on. And, somehow, a few people still believe the game is actually real. See, the consequences of the games these authoritarian psychopaths play are real, indeed. But, it isn’t what the brainwashed masses think.
The “game” played by those in control of governments and central banks is nothing less than complete and total human slavery of Amerikans. By keeping them forever fighting each other in the false left/right narrative, while they are extorted, regulated, taxed, fined, tariffed, inflated and enslaved to eternity. And the only way to win is not to play.
Are you ready to opt out and own yourself?
If you want to learn how to get out of the game and become the truly free, sovereign individual you were meant to be, come to Anarchapulco this February. You can find out more at Anarchapulco.com.
Let me get this right. They're saying that small businesses that accept internet sales from other states have to collect state sales taxes for other states as well? I don't see how they have jurisdiction across state lines. How can the state of Oklahoma (for instance) enforce jurisdiction in New York?
Obviously they haven't figured out the effect this will have on small business. There's no way that IT can adapt to government differences in forms and legal requirements (which is why healthcare.gov was such a failure). I don't want to have to start executing cops to survive and make a living, but if they back me against the wall, so be it.
The same way you can sell shit from Oklahoma to New York, online and through the mail. Most online sales are Amazon, so obviously they won't have any trouble figuring it out and it's not really that hard a problem for the vendors small vendors are using to set up their sales sites now to update software to apply a tax rate based on the location of the order. The effect it will have on small business is eliminating one small advantage that online retailers have over brick and mortar stores, don't worry online still has way less overhead so they will still eventually crush most retail stores as we know them now, like how the malls are dying.
what's that all about?
I don't think you understand the technical challenges involved in staying compliant in all 50 states. The vast majority of IT businesses like mine are a single person writing code. If we're lucky we manage to get past poverty level. There's no way that I as a business owner have any possibility of compliance and still be able to deliver on business because all of my time would be devoted to researching the laws in all states where my customers happen to order from. This will take time away from technical support and cause business meltdown in the long run due to all the extra effort to redirect a few bucks to the right counties. It's totally stupid from a logistical point of view.
Fuck it. I'm old enough to retire now. I'll either just restrict my software business to non US I.P. addresses so that only users from countries outside the USA can use my software or go into retirement and shut down business completely if they start to complain about discrimination. Nobody else does what I do, nor can they. 40+ years of work down the drain because idiots in government don't know when to suppress their parasitic instincts.
I am not a computer coder but I would think it would require about 50 lines of code, perhaps 51. They already have a box to select a state and then that calculates shipping for that address right? wouldn't you just need to enter the different tax rates for the 50 states and then those would be applied? Instead of doing a lot of research yourself I am sure someone has already compiled a list of the tax rates in different states, how long would that really take you to do a "if MA then add 6% to total" for 50 states, like an hour?
Why wouldn't you see this as an opportunity to sell your clients an upgrade?
This was not really a matter of the government's parasitic instincts, it was the result of a lawsuit, it was not fair that Walmart has to pay sales taxes but Amazon doesn't. Why should online retailers not follow the same rules as brick and mortar?
That isn't how sales taxes work. They are split up by county, so you have approximately 9000 - 10,000 jurisdictions to calculate. When I do taxes, I have to find what county the customer "took possession in" and there are currently about 80 jurisdictions I have to do and that takes several hours of work for which at the end a "vendor" is given a "sales tax collection credit" worth approximately 1% of what is owed. That is the legal requirement. Then of course, every county has a different rate and different rules for what is taxable and what can receive exemption. It is considerably more complicated than you have conceived.
I don't write sales tax software, but I did write software for estimated taxes because I found a short way to make my life easier doing it.
An upgrade in what? Why would my clients want to buy sales tax software? They aren't businesses who require it.
Very few businesses are strictly "brick and mortar" anymore. The Amish don't go outside their county. I suspect that Terrel's Appliances which is local also does online business. That's just the norm right now anyway. They all have shops and web addresses. But for those brick and mortar, they aren't doing 9000+ jurisdictions manually which we would have to do.
Because the "place they took possession" is at the store, they only have to do one jurisdiction which makes it very easy to calculate. So the "unfair advantage" is for brick and mortar business.
Don't fall for the state propaganda about "fairness". It's total BS. There's nothing "fair" about business, especially when government doesn't have to compete to become better at it. It can just pass laws to enforce unnatural or inept logistical arrangements.
Voluntary associations, not legalized extortion rackets, are now not just ethically more sound, but also more practical and sustainable. When there is no competition, services have no reason to improve. They can just force everyone to comply and become increasingly inept in the process while patting themselves on the back for success that was not earned. They then become increasingly detached from the reality of what’s really necessary to make things work over time, and law becomes the only means of forcing compliance instead of thinking carefully about better ways to do things.
The system is getting ready to collapse because government parasites who provide little value are draining what little is left of the host.
In my state the sales tax is a state thing, so for MA you would only need one. in which states do counties determine sales tax rates? Even then it is still just a matter of entering the values for those counties.
unless the online only business is paying no taxes. That is the advantage they had that the court ruled against.
At the end of the day most online retail, and most of the growth is Amazon and they got so big in part because of being able to dodge sales taxes for so long.
So without a dominant protection agency enforcing antitrust laws how do you maintain competition and avoid monopolies?
"The system is getting ready to collapse because government parasites who provide little value are draining what little is left of the host."
In addition to screwing Amazon the other day the court decided to gut the public employees unions, that should help our current efforts to shrink the size of government.
We have a paradigm now where bureaucrats job is to spend their entire budget and ask for more every year. In Public Administration class that is the first thing you learn. Level funding and saving money are the only ways you can fail.
Besides my Public Administration teacher I have never heard anyone discuss this basic and inherent flaw in our system that will lead to collapse, besides one guy: Donald Trump.
It's more than that. Run a business for a while and you will begin to understand that the exceptions are many. Some can claim exemptions (religious orgs), some have special rules depending upon what you're selling, with different tax rates for different classes of products. I looked into sales tax software for my business several years ago, but they said I didn't need it. It had over 9000 taxing jurisdictions in the USA alone. It is not just a matter of entering the tax rate for county. For IP's that don't resolve you have to manually Google the address and make sure the county lines are drawn right on the map. Addresses don't often list the county they are in so I have to do this manually. Whenever districts get redrawn (this happens every so often in my Terran Atlas software that I developed), you've just created a software nightmare. EFELE maps are a complicated process. It's bad enough that there are some 400+ time zones with district lines. How much more complicated would 9000 district lines be? Care to guess?
You can't avoid monopolies by substituting government monopolies. But if coercion and theft at gunpoint were finally recognized as immoral, unethical and fundamentally inept logistically, the market would finally be free. Then Amazon would begin to realize that it would have to take over the government infrastructure that it currently isn't paying for or it would no longer be in business. The parasitic relationships are the problem. You need competition or the system just rots from ineptitude. Government is a monopoly and competition at that level is war. It is a fundamental human flaw that cannot be corrected through central authority, but the solution was found in 2008 to the byzantine generals problem that will eventually set things straight (when the technology is ready for mass adoption).
I don't fall for that left / right split the population against itself. I consider all politicians to basically be political criminals given a free pass. I'd just as soon round up Hillary and all the rest of them. They are a blight on humanity. Authoritarianism must stop. Voluntary associations are the only morally and ethically sustainable option. Everything else eventually comes to the spilling of blood.
There you go, off the shelf solutions are already available for this problem.
But how can you avoid them without government monopolies enforcing antitrust laws? How did the byzantine generals/ technology do it?
I don't know where the right and left have anything to do with the basic problem of our bureaucracy which is the unsustainable paradigm I described, I have not heard any politicians on either side ever discuss it or display an understanding of it. Only non politicians, Donald Trump and the professor of Public Administration who explained it on the first day of class. I am all for locking her up. ;)
Anything involving enough humans for a long enough period of time will eventually come to the spilling of blood. So then the question is how much, what we see over the last 100 years is war death rates and famine death rates hitting all time lows.
Thanks for the information and your work, Jeff.
As a Canadian living in Mexico, why do you refer to the American government as "our government"?
LOL
Because I was just joking... I have no govt overlords... they just presume to act like it!
That's a relief - I thought maybe you were a chump fan :)
Because Mexico and all other resource rich regions will continue with their USSA occupations.....ergo "your government."
Just another politician...
uhm idk about you but they have been taxing most stuff online for years now in the states I have lived in. We lost this battle long long ago. Also dont forget its not just trump a bunch of other people have to vote in favor of it who have been in their seats FAR FAR longer then any president.
what's funny is that mostly this policy affects Amazon and Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, who got that way because he found a way to sell shit without charging sales tax like his competition had to. Unless you are Jeff Bezos or do all your shopping online from out of state retailers to avoid sales tax this will affect you very little.
One of the worst decisions ever :(
Hey dollar trying to reach you but you seem not to be in discord.
I will send you a memo as well.
Oh no... Looks a bad move to me (taxing the internet). The internet symbolises freedom. Such that if that freedom be taken away, then what is left! It means trading, even online, will become impossible soon enough!
Skills control the net, not government. That shouldn't change, so that the skill-based development of the media might continue. The moment government comes in, politics will follow.
#SaveTheInternet
they are only taxing internet sales of goods like other retail sales.
Ok. It starts little by little.
it's really that they are no longer getting to take advantage of a loophole created by technology that allows some retailers to dodge taxes while others have to pay.
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