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The tax man cometh (to Amazon)

Jazz Shaw — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 19:01:43 +0000

Ho ho ho

After Black Friday and Small Business Saturday comes Cyber Monday, a day when everyone is supposed to completely fail to rush out to any local stores and, instead, let their fingers do the shopping on their laptops. But as Politico reports, shoppers in a few states who visit Amazon will be in for an unpleasant [...]

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eBay opens the door to online taxes

Jazz Shaw — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 21:01:22 +0000

A "physical nexus"

Free market capitalism makes for a rough battlefield at times, and in the area of online sales the competition can be intense. Now it looks like one of the top sellers, eBay, will seek to go head to head with Amazon in terms of fast delivery for late shoppers as the holidays approach. eBay has [...]

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Super: Amazon & Wal-Mart team up to lobby for new online sales tax

Mary Katharine Ham — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:07:58 +0000

Team ebay

Keep your eye on the, ahem, “Marketplace Fairness Act” in Congress (S.1832). As Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner explains, we’ve all been ordering online for years with no sales tax because there is no federal sales tax, and a 1992 Supreme Court case ruled states can’t “collect sales taxes from a business [with] no [...]

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Chris Christie crosses the Amazon (dot com)

Jazz Shaw — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 18:01:49 +0000

State of the state

Last month we noted that Michigan had joined the list of states where governors and legislatures were wrestling with the issue of lost tax revenue through internet sales. (The “Amazon tax” concept, as it’s come to be known.) Now yet another voice has jumped into the debate and it comes from one of the rising [...]

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Enviro-blackmailers spoof conservative pitch

Jazz Shaw — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 12:01:39 +0000

Fix it? Fix what? The jury?

For some time now we’ve been trying to keep you up to date on the combined efforts of the government of Ecuador, an army of US trial lawyers and a brigade of environmentalists to shake down Chevron for billions of dollars. It’s a rather pathetic effort which should have been brushed under the carpet in [...]

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Two states strike down “Amazon tax”

Jazz Shaw — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:31:22 +0000

A "burden on interstate commerce"

Last winter we opened up a discussion on the Marketplace Fairness Act and the idea of the federal government forcing companies such as Amazon and eBay to collect a sales tax on internet sales. The response was almost uniformly negative here, with one of the most popular proposed alternatives being the idea of letting the [...]

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