Internet taxation is the way of the future...but if states are allowed to tax different things at different levels, how is anyone ever going to keep track of this?
And if I'm forced to pay California's highest state sales tax when I make a purchase from Delaware over eBay, consider the west coast boycotted.
An easy solution: standardize sales taxes across the states...
BUT that undermines one of the fundamental sources of state sovereignty in our federal system. There must be another way...
Sure there is! There are two, actually.
1) The federal government creates a standard Internet Sales Tax...that means all the cash from every transaction goes to the Fed, who then reapportions it to the states as they see fit (somebody has to pay for those earmarks, right?).
Or,
2) Just like the app that calculates postage, create an application that calculates sales tax based on the state of the seller before finalizing the purchase. Since sales from states with higher sales taxes will suffer from loss of sales, the market will eventually drive down the sales taxes to mirror the percentages of other states. Or their overall income will suffer (and probably only a little less than asking people to pay those taxes voluntarily).
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