Internet purchases taxed?

Question

What are the the pros and cons of taxing internet purchases? Should internet purchases be taxed?

Answer 1

depends on which viewpoint your looking from....
from a government viewpoint, taxing internet sales would raise a fair amount of money from a sales tax....
from a business point of view, it's very expensive to design software to figure all the state and local sales tax rates for every city, county, state, etc...this would have to be done if there was an internet sales tax put in place....
from a consumer viewpoint.... I'd rather save that extra cash for myself, rather than pay it to the government. The lack of sales tax on most internet sales makes it cheaper for consumers, and helps increase overall sales on the internet... this helps many small businesses.
I think the way it works now, at least with my own internet business, is that we charge the sales tax for any sales completed in our own state...others are not charged. Bigger companies, like Amazon, have to charge tax wherever they have an actual outlet...like a store or distribution center...
the biggest problem is that figuring all the different possible sales tax rates is that there are so many of them... the software is available, but is so expensive that it would place a large burden on the many small businesses that are surviving on the internet...
another alternative would be a national sales tax that would be a single rate everywhere....then divided up by the government and paid to states....but who wants to pay more?

Answer 2

All Internet purchases are subject to sales tax if you live in a state with sales tax. If you have not been reporting those purchases on your state tax returns you should rush down to the tax authority and get in line to pay up. The good news is that the line will be very short, because very few people ever pay sales tax on Internet purchases unless they are collected by the seller.

Answer 3

Under current US law, purchases made online ARE subject to the same taxes as any other purchase. What confuses many people is that merchants selling to buyers in other state are not required to COLLECT on behalf of those states. ACCESS to the Internet is not taxable under US Federal law.