In California, there are 1700 jurisdictions that charge their own tax rates.
http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/files/city_rates.csv
Of course, most of them break down to 5 or 6 different rates, but still, a merchant has to keep track of them all? Multiply that by 50 states.

Amazingly enough, there’s software out there that handles all that. Any company that does physical business already needs to be on top of the complex tax code. Asking a technology company that made $200 million in net income this past quarter to keep track of those same regulations is not impossible.

If the state want to recover their tax revenues, they have better results sending tax collectors to where illegal immigrants set up their lucrative front yard sales. There no sales tax collected there and prices are low. Best of all, profits are send across the border, so no federal revenue either. With free school, food stamps, cash wages no wonder they come by the truck loads.

Locally established businesses can’t even compete, they have to pay for permits, bullcrap taxes, fees, inspections, workers comp and other nonsense setup by the government to discourage doing business. And the officials wonder why businesses ran away to Texas as fast as they can move?

I surely hope they keep raising the goddamn taxes in that states and drive anyone with enough senses to move out of that state by the droves and leave the idiots comfortably paying their beloved double or quadruple taxation scheme. Want the weather? Disneyland? Just go and visit. Much cheaper than having chunks of your income constantly being chomped away by taxes and fees.

If you have entitlement mentality, don’t move anywhere. California is just perfect for you.

California is the new Greece.

It’s funny, if ever a law was made to have the opposite of the intended effect, this tax law would be it.

The problem here – which Proposition 13 illustrates as a symptom – is the direct democracy model in California wherein anyone can get anything on the ballot. An example would be a proposition stating that every Californian should be given $100 on their birthday. That would, of course, pass overwhelmingly! But then you’d have a massive deficit. Try passing a tax hike of $100 per person per year, and you’d never get it through. There, in a nutshell, is the problem.

And of course, you get Prop 8, too.

I’m not going to advertise for a bunch of whiny babies who start emailing threats when they don’t get their way.”

What are you smoking? This is a business decision, not “emailed threats”

What the states want is for all businesses to collect tax for the state, county, and city EACH and every buyer lives in. Even if it ends up being 22 cents for one transaction. And, those rates vary for the cities and counties and regularly change.

Multiply this times every state, city, and county in the U.S., and you can see where this would be a logistical nightmare. It could kill interstate business.

Can you imagine if you were a small retailer, and you had to collect and remit taxes for thousands of these separate districts? It would make it impossible to conduct business. Amazon is larger, but it is still an incredible burden. For them to do this, they would have to add lots of staff and prices would go through the roof.

This is what people are not hearing and do not understand.

This is going to backfire and cost more jobs and revenue than they could hope to gain. The only thing that would work would be one national sales tax.

I don’t know what world you’re living in, but it’s not this one. The GOP platform is based on avoidance of taxes.

State legislators don’t get paid until there’s a budget, so now it’s personal. They can pass a budget with simple majority, but increasing taxes takes 2/3, so an already existing tax that’s incompletely enforced looks like a godsend to the jackals who are desperate to get their own salaries reinstated.

Amazon’s not to blame for any of that, and California’s high sales tax rates shouldn’t be their problem. If California wants to get grabby, just don’t play.

if trickle down actually worked, california would be a capitalist utopia by now. are property owners passing along their tax savings to companies that rent their buildings? fat chance. they are pocketing the difference.

the collapse of california is directly attributable to prop 13. we were sold a bill of goods. meanwhile, the republicans distract joe six pack with the illegal immigrant issue. it’s really a beautiful disinformation campaign, and it’s all going exactly to plan.

So a company that employs about 50 people now has a choice to make: just watch that revenue drift into the sunset or set up shop in another state where there is no such law.

Either way, Illinois is losing revenue on payroll and corporate income in a useless effort to strongarm Amazon into collecting their sales tax for them.

Here’s what Amazon’s Bezos says: “Our point-of-view on this is that we should simplify the sales tax system, and we’ve been insisting on this for 10 years. We support the streamlined sales tax initiative, and 22 states have signed on. The right way to fix this is with federal legislation. Sales tax is very complicated. We’re no different from big chains of retailers. They don’t collect sales tax in states where they don’t have nexus either. So everyone is following the same rules.”

Nope.

The 1992 SCOTUS decision: Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 essentially said for an out of state business to be required to collect sales tax it had to have a presence in the state, i.e.: nexus.

And the decicion was in regards to a mail order company.

Governor brown just signed the aforementioned affiliate nexus taxes into law minutes ago. They took effect instantly.

It’s unfair for the Smiths to pay $500 a year in taxes, because they bought it decades ago, when the Jones pay $5K annually for exactly the same house. It’s not like the Smiths have stopped using public services.

I’m not elderly, or poor, or on a fixed income. But consider my situation:

We bought a house barely a decade ago, just before the recent great real-estate bubble took off. In about 7 years, the price of comparable houses in my neighborhood tripled.

Despite the great increase in prices, the value of my house remained the same: Its value, to me, is that it’s a decent house in a nice neighborhood near the studio where my partner works.

If I’d sold my house at the peak of the bubble, it would have sold for the (then-current) price of a decent house in a nice neighborhood near the studio. So what it was worth – its actual value – was exactly the same, despite the change in price.

If I’d sold my house then, but wanted to continue to have a decent house in a nice neighborhood near the studio, it would have cost about the same as the (hugely inflated) price I would’ve gotten. So its value didn’t change at all.

Now, just a couple of years later, comparable houses are selling for about half to two-thirds what they were at the bubble’s peak. If I sold my house today, that’s what I’d get for it. And that would still be just enough to buy to buy a decent house in a nice neighborhood near the studio. So, again, its value remains exactly the same.

The only way I could ‘extract’ any ‘value’ would be by giving up my decent house in a nice neighborhood near the studio and settling for something less.

(And please, don’t anyone start with that ‘extract value with a home-equity loan’ crap. That’s a loan. I already have enough to credit to get loans of more money than I can afford to repay. I don’t need to hock my house to make that happen.)

And gosh knows the price of city services didn’t triple in that seven-year interval. Nor drop by half in the couple of years since.

Is it ‘fair’ that my neighbor two houses down is paying three times as much property tax as I am? Well, he spent three times what I did on his house. If I’d had to pay triple my original price, I wouldn’t have – I wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

So the property tax is pegged to what you can afford to spend on a house, just like the sales tax on your car is pegged to what you can afford to spend on a car. Even if the prices of cars go up later.

As others have said, the real problem with Prop 13 is the “immortal-owner-corporation” shenanigans that keep commercial property taxes from from rising, even when the property actually does change hands.

Perhaps there needs to be some more realistic way of adjusting residential taxes for long-time owners, but basing taxes on the insane fluctuations of speculator-driven housing price bubbles – which bear no real relationship to actual value (and which recur with reliable regularity) – isn’t going to fly – and for very good reason.

Actually, only 45 states have a sales tax.

This is the same thing that other states are doing and why Amazon is pulling out of them, as well.