Now that the online shopping behemoth has been adopting a locally-based business model, it has reversed positions to join Walmart and other brick-and-mortar chains in pushing for Internet-wide sales tax collection:
[T]he writing is on the wall for Amazon. Plainly, its helping itself by making sure its competitors have to pay tax too. A representative of Amazon.com urged Congress to enact the Marketplace Fairness Act. The bill, S. 1832, would require online retailers who exceed a revenue threshold to collect and remit state sales tax on online purchases in all states. The Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing doesn’t mean passage is a certainty. Still, consider that the Senate bill has 240 supporters including Best Buy, Target and Walmart, not to mention Amazon. But eBay objects to the small-business exemption which maxes out at $500,000 in gross annual sales.
Another bill, H.R. 3179, would also "replace the physical-presence rule with a requirement that state and local governments simplify their tax policies if they want to collect sales taxes from out-of-state retailers". There's an interesting debate over whether this constitutes a new tax or not:
"It's not a tax issue. It's a collection issue," David French of the National Retail Federation told me. He's senior vice president of government relations at the federation, which supports the legislation. French is right, strictly speaking. You probably know that consumers who don't pay sales tax when they buy a TV on Amazon.com are supposed to pay a "use tax" later to their own state governments. And you probably also know that almost no one does that. In the sparse data on use tax you'll find, you'll see a 2009 study that shows that 0.3 percent of California residents reported use tax on their income tax filing. Maine, by the way, wins the crown for most honest taxpayers, with 9.8 percent paying use tax that year.
The Dish 