Will you soon have to pay sales tax on every online purchase?

Forty-five states rely on sales taxes for revenue, and for those states that have no income tax, sales taxes are very important. Estimates of how much money the states are losing vary dramatically, ranging from more than $200 billion over five years to a recent estimate from the Government Accountability Office of between $8 billion and $13 billion per year.

For much of the last decade, states have been pressing Congress to fix the problem, to pass a bill that levels the playing field. But Congress, buffeted by anti-tax groups, has walked away from the issue…

The idea was to pass a bill that required out-of-state sellers to collect sales taxes as a way to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s prior decisions. The bill passed the South Dakota legislature, and was invalidated, as predicted by the state courts. That, in turn, enabled the state to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, where all indications are that at least some of the justices are ready to re-examine the old precedent.

Indeed, Justice Neil Gorsuch once called the current system “a judicially created tax shelter.” And, in 2015, Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested he was prepared to overrule the Supreme Court’s 1967 and 1992 decisions in light of modern realities.