Texas: Amazon, where's the taxes? Amazon: Texas, where's the jobs?...Oh yeah, we're leaving. (spokesman, lobby)

[70Ford]

The Alliance for Main Street Fairness, a lobbying group for small businesses working to eliminate Internet sales tax loopholes, criticized Amazon's decision to close the Irving center.
"Texas retailers collect and remit sales taxes every day — whether the sale happens in a store or online," said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the group. "Amazon.com was asked to play by the same rules, and has responded by eliminating hundreds of Texas jobs. Amazon could have chosen to collect the sales tax as Texas retailers do, but instead they opted to protect their special sales tax loophole to the detriment of hardworking families."

APNewsBreak: Amazon closing TX center amid dispute - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110210/ap_on_bi_ge/us_amazon_sales_tax_dispute - broken link)

Sounds like what Boeing did, in a way.


Boeing's Washington facility to be duplicated in South Carolina.

Boeing would much rather build the facilities to make airplanes elsewhere more quickly now so as to limit the impact of such removal of tax breaks. Further, Boeing has profit margins of about 5%. They need these tax breaks, or else they'll be even or negative. Further, those tax breaks lower the cost of the airplanes we sell overseas, who typically have enormous levies placed on imported technical machines like airplanes.
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Tax break or tax loophole still equals money, heh .
It's just good business.

[LauraC]

We don't buy books from Amazon distribution centers. We buy them from Amazon located in the Pacific Northwest. That they ship them from closer locations should be irrelevant. An Amazon distribution place is coming to Tennessee to employ about 1400 people and we Tennesseans who are customers of Amazon don't think we should have to pay Tennessee sales tax on those purchases just because they will be shipped from some Tennessee warehouse.

http://www.city-data.com/forum/tenne...ax-2011-a.html

[Jaggy001]

This is a good example as to how the current sales tax structure is not adapted to online commerce. Different states have tried different methods to tax buying online and out of state but none of them are really satisfactory. As online commerce becomes more prevalent, at some point we will need to figure out a better way than the traditional sales tax.

[Calvinist]

Originally Posted by LauraC

We don't buy books from Amazon distribution centers. We buy them from Amazon located in the Pacific Northwest. That they ship them from closer locations should be irrelevant. An Amazon distribution place is coming to Tennessee to employ about 1400 people and we Tennesseans who are customers of Amazon don't think we should have to pay Tennessee sales tax on those purchases just because they will be shipped from some Tennessee warehouse.

http://www.city-data.com/forum/tenne...ax-2011-a.html

That sounds good and nice....but I know my state expects me to voluntarily tell them what I buy off the internet so that they can charge me for it.

[Jaggy001]

Originally Posted by Calvinist

That sounds good and nice....but I know my state expects me to voluntarily tell them what I buy off the internet so that they can charge me for it.

If I remember rightly, New York assumes you have but you can pay a standard amount in lieu of providing proof and receipts.

[HappyTexan]

States are hurting for revenue and see this as "their lost revenue".
States should have treated their "brick and mortar" companies a little better and maybe they wouldn't have gone out of business.