if you're an american you might have noticed lately that shopping online has
gotten a little bit more expensive and this is not to help jeff bezos pay his
alimony oh zing anyway if you were to
look closely at the bill for that 18 pack of toilet paper you just bought you
might notice that you're now being charged sales tax something that's
becoming more and more common around the united states on purchases made online
but then again i mean it's 2019 like why
is this happening now and if you guys are watching from a different part of
the world you're probably really confused because like what americans
could shop online without paying tax no
fair and yeah to quite a significant
extent they could you see in the u.s
sales taxes are collected by the individual states themselves not by the
federal government so that means that if you're an online retailer you get
subjected to this large hodgepodge of laws about whether or not you have to
charge your customers tax depending on what state they're from and unlike
places such as europe where all online purchases have had value-added tax or
vat slapped on them for a long time the
law in the u.s was that individual states couldn't require businesses to
collect sales tax unless they had a physical presence inside the state you
know something like a retail store this rule actually came out of a federal
court case from 1992 that didn't even
involve the internet rather the controversy was over a company using a
mail order catalog to ship floppy disks to north dakota
anyway the idea was that if a state could force far away retailers to
collect sales tax it would be too much of a hindrance to interstate commerce
possibly making it hard for folks to order cheap perfume off of daytime
shopping networks so this was the law that americans lived
under for a long time and for online shoppers it was pretty freaking sweet
since if their favorite online store didn't have enough of a physical
presence inside their state they could shop tax-free
now state governments were wise to this and a number of them asked their
citizens to voluntarily report otherwise
tax-free online purchases and pay a use tax but
you can guess how much luck they had with that now of course many of you
americans have been paying tax on online shopping for a while now regardless as
more and more digital retailers have expanded their physical operations into
more states but last year a new supreme
court case ironically involving the other dakota this time
changed the legal situation completely
the current supreme court ruled that because so much of the nation's commerce is now
online the old physical presence rule just doesn't make sense anymore and so
the court allowed states to charge tax with far fewer restrictions on sales and
as state governments rarely turn down opportunities for easy money most of
them are now forcing online retailers to collect and then fork over this sales
tax the states can do this as long as the
company is selling a certain dollar amount worth of merchandise or selling
to a certain number of customers within their state so that they're not running
a foul of that pesky old constitution but let's say that you really don't want
to get charged an extra 70 bucks for that thousand dollar tv you're planning
to buy is there any way around the new laws
actually yes there is move to one of the five states that just don't have a sales
tax like montana just make sure you watch out for the
bears they have bears in montana
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