A booksellers association take on Amazon...

[anghara]

Fewer Books, More Potholes: The True Cost of Amazon’s Tax Gimmickry

How many new teachers could you hire in California for $48,000,000 per year—1,000, maybe more? How many police officers or fire-fighters could you employ? How many books could you buy for school libraries—5,000,000? You could get at least that many.

$48,000,000 is the estimated amount of revenue that California loses each year by Amazon.com’s refusal to collect and pay sales taxes in this state. If you consider that Amazon has been thumbing its nose at California tax laws for more than a decade, the amount lost is probably well over half-a-billion dollars.


Rest of the article is here (you have to scroll down the page a little)

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Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Aaarrgh! This California resident had already stopped ordering so much via Amazon. This is a really good reason to stop all together.

[oakwind.livejournal.com]

It's a lot of money and where I can see that it could help state gov. on the other hand it would be collected from individual's so another way to put it might be that $48,000,000 has been saved by the people buying books from Amazon. If the money went to the States there is no guarantee that they would spend it to pay teachers. They would put it where they wanted to and as usual the individual would have very little to say about how it is spent.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if you COULD trust the authorities to put the money where it's, you know, actually needed...? Like schools, or healthcare...?

Sigh...

[oakwind.livejournal.com]

If we could designate where at least some of our tax money went it would certainly feel good, wouldn't it? Maybe by percents?

[lmarley.livejournal.com]

I don't understand how this works. Our state of Washington has ways to make us pay sales tax on things we buy on the internet, so . . . WTF, Amazon? They can just say no, and that's it?

[katatomic.livejournal.com]

The State of California Franchise Tax Board has its head up its collective butt far enough to look out at the world from between its own tonsils.