I don't think you understand the technical challenges involved in staying compliant in all 50 states. The vast majority of IT businesses like mine are a single person writing code. If we're lucky we manage to get past poverty level. There's no way that I as a business owner have any possibility of compliance and still be able to deliver on business because all of my time would be devoted to researching the laws in all states where my customers happen to order from. This will take time away from technical support and cause business meltdown in the long run due to all the extra effort to redirect a few bucks to the right counties. It's totally stupid from a logistical point of view.
Fuck it. I'm old enough to retire now. I'll either just restrict my software business to non US I.P. addresses so that only users from countries outside the USA can use my software or go into retirement and shut down business completely if they start to complain about discrimination. Nobody else does what I do, nor can they. 40+ years of work down the drain because idiots in government don't know when to suppress their parasitic instincts.
I am not a computer coder but I would think it would require about 50 lines of code, perhaps 51. They already have a box to select a state and then that calculates shipping for that address right? wouldn't you just need to enter the different tax rates for the 50 states and then those would be applied? Instead of doing a lot of research yourself I am sure someone has already compiled a list of the tax rates in different states, how long would that really take you to do a "if MA then add 6% to total" for 50 states, like an hour?
Why wouldn't you see this as an opportunity to sell your clients an upgrade?
This was not really a matter of the government's parasitic instincts, it was the result of a lawsuit, it was not fair that Walmart has to pay sales taxes but Amazon doesn't. Why should online retailers not follow the same rules as brick and mortar?
That isn't how sales taxes work. They are split up by county, so you have approximately 9000 - 10,000 jurisdictions to calculate. When I do taxes, I have to find what county the customer "took possession in" and there are currently about 80 jurisdictions I have to do and that takes several hours of work for which at the end a "vendor" is given a "sales tax collection credit" worth approximately 1% of what is owed. That is the legal requirement. Then of course, every county has a different rate and different rules for what is taxable and what can receive exemption. It is considerably more complicated than you have conceived.
I don't write sales tax software, but I did write software for estimated taxes because I found a short way to make my life easier doing it.
An upgrade in what? Why would my clients want to buy sales tax software? They aren't businesses who require it.
Very few businesses are strictly "brick and mortar" anymore. The Amish don't go outside their county. I suspect that Terrel's Appliances which is local also does online business. That's just the norm right now anyway. They all have shops and web addresses. But for those brick and mortar, they aren't doing 9000+ jurisdictions manually which we would have to do.
Because the "place they took possession" is at the store, they only have to do one jurisdiction which makes it very easy to calculate. So the "unfair advantage" is for brick and mortar business.
Don't fall for the state propaganda about "fairness". It's total BS. There's nothing "fair" about business, especially when government doesn't have to compete to become better at it. It can just pass laws to enforce unnatural or inept logistical arrangements.
Voluntary associations, not legalized extortion rackets, are now not just ethically more sound, but also more practical and sustainable. When there is no competition, services have no reason to improve. They can just force everyone to comply and become increasingly inept in the process while patting themselves on the back for success that was not earned. They then become increasingly detached from the reality of what’s really necessary to make things work over time, and law becomes the only means of forcing compliance instead of thinking carefully about better ways to do things.
The system is getting ready to collapse because government parasites who provide little value are draining what little is left of the host.
In my state the sales tax is a state thing, so for MA you would only need one. in which states do counties determine sales tax rates? Even then it is still just a matter of entering the values for those counties.
unless the online only business is paying no taxes. That is the advantage they had that the court ruled against.
At the end of the day most online retail, and most of the growth is Amazon and they got so big in part because of being able to dodge sales taxes for so long.
So without a dominant protection agency enforcing antitrust laws how do you maintain competition and avoid monopolies?
"The system is getting ready to collapse because government parasites who provide little value are draining what little is left of the host."
In addition to screwing Amazon the other day the court decided to gut the public employees unions, that should help our current efforts to shrink the size of government.
We have a paradigm now where bureaucrats job is to spend their entire budget and ask for more every year. In Public Administration class that is the first thing you learn. Level funding and saving money are the only ways you can fail.
Besides my Public Administration teacher I have never heard anyone discuss this basic and inherent flaw in our system that will lead to collapse, besides one guy: Donald Trump.
It's more than that. Run a business for a while and you will begin to understand that the exceptions are many. Some can claim exemptions (religious orgs), some have special rules depending upon what you're selling, with different tax rates for different classes of products. I looked into sales tax software for my business several years ago, but they said I didn't need it. It had over 9000 taxing jurisdictions in the USA alone. It is not just a matter of entering the tax rate for county. For IP's that don't resolve you have to manually Google the address and make sure the county lines are drawn right on the map. Addresses don't often list the county they are in so I have to do this manually. Whenever districts get redrawn (this happens every so often in my Terran Atlas software that I developed), you've just created a software nightmare. EFELE maps are a complicated process. It's bad enough that there are some 400+ time zones with district lines. How much more complicated would 9000 district lines be? Care to guess?
You can't avoid monopolies by substituting government monopolies. But if coercion and theft at gunpoint were finally recognized as immoral, unethical and fundamentally inept logistically, the market would finally be free. Then Amazon would begin to realize that it would have to take over the government infrastructure that it currently isn't paying for or it would no longer be in business. The parasitic relationships are the problem. You need competition or the system just rots from ineptitude. Government is a monopoly and competition at that level is war. It is a fundamental human flaw that cannot be corrected through central authority, but the solution was found in 2008 to the byzantine generals problem that will eventually set things straight (when the technology is ready for mass adoption).
I don't fall for that left / right split the population against itself. I consider all politicians to basically be political criminals given a free pass. I'd just as soon round up Hillary and all the rest of them. They are a blight on humanity. Authoritarianism must stop. Voluntary associations are the only morally and ethically sustainable option. Everything else eventually comes to the spilling of blood.
There you go, off the shelf solutions are already available for this problem.
But how can you avoid them without government monopolies enforcing antitrust laws? How did the byzantine generals/ technology do it?
I don't know where the right and left have anything to do with the basic problem of our bureaucracy which is the unsustainable paradigm I described, I have not heard any politicians on either side ever discuss it or display an understanding of it. Only non politicians, Donald Trump and the professor of Public Administration who explained it on the first day of class. I am all for locking her up. ;)
Anything involving enough humans for a long enough period of time will eventually come to the spilling of blood. So then the question is how much, what we see over the last 100 years is war death rates and famine death rates hitting all time lows.
Which will be subject to price gouging because they are now legally required. It was about $50 / month last time I looked (which was over 10 years ago). I suspect that it's much higher now.
This will be the most punishing for small businesses (Amazon can easily afford such software and an army of lawyers to boot). Because the cost of such software can put many small businesses out of business, this legislation actually favors big business. But anything to satisfy the great God of Trump right? Fuck them all.
You don't seem to get what I'm saying about voluntary associations. The whole point of voluntarism is to not spill blood. It is the state that commits the most violence of all. As an apparent statist, why are you even reading @dollarvigilante?
I bet the same software 10 years later is a lot cheaper or free by now. I think if the cost of the software was very great it would bankrupt some marginal businesses but I suspect it will be very small. I am sure I didn't say anything about "the great God of Trump", this has little to do with Trump. This change was the result of a Supreme Court decision.
I get the theory and how it is supposed to work about voluntary associations, but I see many flaws and unproven and false premises that are not addressed by its proponents, instead they often get mad when asked to discuss them.
Democide was the leading cause of unnatural death in the last century but the definition should probably be refined, it was not every state on earth killing their own people en masse that drove that number, it was a handful of authoritarian socialist states that killed huge numbers of their own people. It's not really fair to blame all states for the actions of a few. That would be like judging all gun owners by the ones that go on shooting sprees. I see a lot of parallels between a lot of the argument and rhetoric I get from anti gun people as I get from anarchists.
They will say "without guns we could eliminate gun violence" just as "without the state we could eliminate state violence", its simplistic and sophomoric, for starters they offer no means to get rid of these things and secondly then there would still be every other kind of violence, perhaps more. Just like anti gun people never look at how many lives guns save anti government people don't look at the lives saved by government they only look at the bad things and then generalize. If the American government did something bad then somehow all governments must do whatever it is. somehow that becomes an immutable feature of government in general.
I think it's funny to hear a Canadian living in Mexico rail against America, don't you?