If I get exempted from a fee that everyone else has to pay, this is a subsidy. And Amazon is getting a subsidy in the states that have sales taxes, since they do not have to pay the tax, by virtue of their superior lobbyists.
While there are some services that stores with a physical presence benefit from as result of being there, this is at most a tiny fraction of the cost of the tax. And, guess what, Amazon benefits from the police and fire service too, because no one would order from Amazon if they thought that people could hijack the UPS trucks delivering their stuff and steal it with impunity before it got to their doorstep.
In terms of the difficulty of complying with the tax, maybe someone should tell Amazon about a thing called "computers." It makes it real easy to process thousands of different tax rates on different items, almost all of which correspond to zip codes that they have on their mailing address. Frankly, any Internet retailer that can't figure out a method for coding the sales taxes is probably too incompetent to be in business. Will there me some mistakes? Guess what, there are mistakes now, this is not a serious argument.
While there are some services that stores with a physical presence benefit from as result of being there, this is at most a tiny fraction of the cost of the tax. And, guess what, Amazon benefits from the police and fire service too, because no one would order from Amazon if they thought that people could hijack the UPS trucks delivering their stuff and steal it with impunity before it got to their doorstep.
In terms of the difficulty of complying with the tax, maybe someone should tell Amazon about a thing called "computers." It makes it real easy to process thousands of different tax rates on different items, almost all of which correspond to zip codes that they have on their mailing address. Frankly, any Internet retailer that can't figure out a method for coding the sales taxes is probably too incompetent to be in business. Will there me some mistakes? Guess what, there are mistakes now, this is not a serious argument.