Lydia DePhillis supports the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would require online retailers to collect sales taxes on out-of-state purchases:
Among the Internet’s great virtues is its ability to make everything easy: setting up a business, communicating with customers, organizing records … and paying taxes. Opponents fret that it’s unfair for online businesses to have to separate out different tax rates for 45 different states. But tools for managing sales and payments are already more than sophisticated enough to handle the task—every credit card has a billing address, after all—and the legislation requires states to provide appropriate software to the businesses it covers. Local governments that are legalizing online gambling are also legislating location-based online payments, having figured out how to pinpoint with near 100 percent accuracy where a customer is located. It might take a while for states to work out kinks in their systems, but to say it’s impossible is to deny the reasons we value the Web in the first place.
McArdle thinks the law would be a burden for small businesses:
The bill makes this slightly easier by exempting the smallest businesses and saying that you only have to file one return per state. But that’s still hours and hours of work per month, for folks who are probably already working pretty damn hard.
This bill, in fact, is good for Amazon—it kills off their small-fry competitors who can’t afford the staff accountants (or the software) to file 46 returns every month. And it frees them up to open warehouses in more states, the better to minimize their shipping costs. Presumably, that’s why they’re in favor of the bill.
But it’s going to be hell on sole proprietorships and other small businesses that can’t afford the compliance overhead. Anyone who has had to file income tax returns in two states can imagine why you might not want to file in almost 50—monthly.
The Dish 