Amazon Fire Draws Ire Of Sales Tax Site

As an Amazon Marketplace seller (sole proprietor, self-employed), I AM a local small business that will be hurt by this. Oh, btw, I buy some of my merchandise for resale from brick & mortar stores and do pay local sales tax on it. This is an unholy alliance of giants like Walmart & Target with deep pockets allied with local governments. This is really bad for the consumer too.

I agree w/ comment #1 and NOT with the columnist who has his nose so far up Amazon’s rear tat he doesn’t realize that it doesn’t matter who is complaining, it is the complaint that is wrong. It is like saying “The host of To Catch a Predator on Dateline is a perve so they should stop catching predators.” Amazon is a predator. Period. They set up LLCs and corporations for the sole purpose of avoiding nexus and taxes. They have legitimate ties to California, Arizona and others that are far deeper than just their piss-on affiliates who they also snubbed unfairly. Wake up Mr. Smith. Lobbyists and greed are wrong all the way around.

It's not ironic at all. The companies whose primary business is in physical retail has to collect sales tax both at the store locations and online whenever there's nexus. However what is ironic is that Amazon already collects sales tax in New York. In addition, I thought Amazon resolved the sales tax issue in California, agreeing to start collecting in 2012.
But this whole issue is Congress's fault. They should have gotten involved years ago and passed sensible legislation for online vendors. Collecting sales tax for all states would still be a problem for small businesses. Collecting isn't an issue - there are simple databases that have the tax rates by zip code that can be plugged into any e-commerce system. The big issue is having to pay sales taxes to 50 states and hundreds of localities. There needs to be a Federal clearinghouse so that small businesses can make one payment to a single location and have the Feds redistribute the money to the states.