BebuLamar

Now that collecting tax when you buy and sell used car is something I am against. If they collect tax on used car from private party then why not collecting tax when you sell your old cameras?

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

There are not any local merchants anymore. I live in Cincinnati and the only shop in town is DODD's Camera. they are over priced as are many camera stores even online due to a lack of true competition. The large corporate empire and attrition (old stores closing due to death or bad health of older owners) has been swallowing the little mom and pop stores for years. Since the government cannot tax an empty store and gets less from one corporation than several they go after who is left and in photography it is the online sales. There used to be here in Cincinnati a lot of labs with many workers in each as well as many camera stores with employees. Now we have Best Buy and Dodd Camera and one lab called Robin Imagining left. The used to be camera shops in the drug stores are now pretty much just a place where one can go to print out an 8x10 when the average person wants only one and their home printer they feel is not good enough to make one and they really do not want to buy a pack of 10 8x10 papers to print on.

We are left with no real service. I asked at Dodd's the other week or so ago about lenses, the clerk (like the clerk in the pawn shop I visited before him) had no idea if the lens I was looking at would work on my Nikon D7200. AI went home and looked it up at B&H then while online I made a minor purchase of a few 16 G fast memory cards for my camera. The price online was around $10 each and at DODD was around $25 each. If you have a shop near you call yourself lucky. I hope they hire better sales people at DODD but I know they do not pay the sales people much nor give them much in incentives to stick around more than a few months or a year.

Now our government just wants their share. I say my representatives are overpaid know nothing's about freedom and the real American way. These politicians only know how to change a subject and speak out of ignorance of existing law and then point fingers at the other party. We tax payers pay way too much for what is given to the poor illegal immigrant than what is given to a poor born in our country American. For a country that claims it is broke I ask, "Why do we keep paying to help countries that are socialist nations that want all Americans and their government dead?". I mean if I am broke I can't go and buy me a beer anyplace but yet our government buys the brewery and gives it away when it is broke. Sorry we do not need more taxes we need fewer politicians and their lackeys they pay to help them do nothing.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

sshhh....don't let the politicians know about this...

fishone0 Loc: Kingman AZ

I have been paying state sales tax on Amazon for a long time

fishone0 Loc: Kingman AZ

just ordered a lens from B&H and I didn't pay sales tax I don't know how it will work out in the future but I do pay state sales tax on my Amazon orders --which is a lot easier on my purse than paying city and state tax when I purchase from my local retailer --at my local retailer I pay 9.50 % which I think is outrageous-- I prefer shopping out of town which has a cheaper sales tax

avman Loc: Normal IL

No Doubt....Here in Normal local sales tax is 8.75%....nothing Normal about that!

rcarol

I had a $172 Million contract to provide desktop computers to the government so I might know just a little bit about computers. As I said, I doubt that your desktop computer would be up to the challenge of collecting and distributing sales taxes. Your solution is to offload it to a company that does have the resources. Fine. How much will this cost the user? Will the small user be able to afford this service or a service like it? Will this drive the small business person away from the internet? I don't know any of these answers. Do you? I'm not trying to be argumentative but I don't think the answer is simple or inexpensive. Only time will tell which of us is right.

tenor57

Best view of New Jersey is in the rear view mirror :-)

rcarol

Very good point.

tropics68 Loc: Georgia

Probably has a APP for that. Don't they have an app for everything?

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

Yes, you are being VERY argumentative. Sales tax is a small application compared to some of the stuff that can be done on a desktop computer or a laptop. Heck, this being a photographic website, doing image post-processing on a pictures requires far more computing power than calculating sales taxes.

As I have said several times now, there are services that do that for you and I'll bet you there will be a bunch of other providers for this simple service that will cost very little on a per-transaction basis. Accepting credit cards is almost ubiquitous now at places and by people that would never have done it just a few years ago.

For example, for the last couple of years local swim teams have events where they serve food like hot dogs, hamburgers and bottled water and such and they take credit cards which they zip through a little adapter on a smartphone. It's pennies per transaction.

On a small business's website, the shopping basket and credit card is all a service provided by a third-party that charges a small percentage for each transaction. The sales tax thing will just be an additional services provided the same way, probably by the same people.

This doesn't require gigantic computers with vast amounts of storage. This is a no-brainer, just another opportunity to offer a service and suck money from the consumer to feed the forever hungry governments.

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

Exactly. Just wait and see.

rcarol

You said it yourself when you referred to third party providers offering up these services. Credit card transactions and sales tax stuff will be handled using someone else's mainframe, not your desktop computer.

pendennis

The ruling is effective from the day the Supreme Court made it.

In the U.S. Constitution there's this thing called Article 1, Section 10, which states in part that no state shall pass any ex post facto law...

pendennis

The Chinese would have to sign a treaty in order to be the collection agent for the several states' sales/use tax assessments. Besides, it's the end user who's responsible to remit the tax to the state/local taxing jurisdiction, absent withholding by the seller.

Down the road, it may be interesting if an individual refuses to pay on the basis that the Supreme Court ruled that states may collect sales taxes. State laws would have to be rewritten or modified.