WEBVTT

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if you're an american you might have noticed lately that shopping online has

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gotten a little bit more expensive and this is not to help jeff bezos pay his

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alimony oh zing anyway if you were to

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look closely at the bill for that 18 pack of toilet paper you just bought you

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might notice that you're now being charged sales tax something that's

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becoming more and more common around the united states on purchases made online

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but then again i mean it's 2019 like why

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is this happening now and if you guys are watching from a different part of

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the world you're probably really confused because like what americans

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could shop online without paying tax no

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fair and yeah to quite a significant

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extent they could you see in the u.s

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sales taxes are collected by the individual states themselves not by the

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federal government so that means that if you're an online retailer you get

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subjected to this large hodgepodge of laws about whether or not you have to

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charge your customers tax depending on what state they're from and unlike

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places such as europe where all online purchases have had value-added tax or

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vat slapped on them for a long time the

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law in the u.s was that individual states couldn't require businesses to

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collect sales tax unless they had a physical presence inside the state you

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know something like a retail store this rule actually came out of a federal

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court case from 1992 that didn't even

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involve the internet rather the controversy was over a company using a

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mail order catalog to ship floppy disks to north dakota

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anyway the idea was that if a state could force far away retailers to

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collect sales tax it would be too much of a hindrance to interstate commerce

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possibly making it hard for folks to order cheap perfume off of daytime

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shopping networks so this was the law that americans lived

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under for a long time and for online shoppers it was pretty freaking sweet

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since if their favorite online store didn't have enough of a physical

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presence inside their state they could shop tax-free

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now state governments were wise to this and a number of them asked their

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citizens to voluntarily report otherwise

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tax-free online purchases and pay a use tax but

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you can guess how much luck they had with that now of course many of you

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americans have been paying tax on online shopping for a while now regardless as

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more and more digital retailers have expanded their physical operations into

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more states but last year a new supreme

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court case ironically involving the other dakota this time

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changed the legal situation completely

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the current supreme court ruled that because so much of the nation's commerce is now

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online the old physical presence rule just doesn't make sense anymore and so

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the court allowed states to charge tax with far fewer restrictions on sales and

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as state governments rarely turn down opportunities for easy money most of

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them are now forcing online retailers to collect and then fork over this sales

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tax the states can do this as long as the

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company is selling a certain dollar amount worth of merchandise or selling

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to a certain number of customers within their state so that they're not running

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a foul of that pesky old constitution but let's say that you really don't want

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to get charged an extra 70 bucks for that thousand dollar tv you're planning

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to buy is there any way around the new laws

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actually yes there is move to one of the five states that just don't have a sales

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tax like montana just make sure you watch out for the

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bears they have bears in montana

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you know what else you got to watch out for your brain

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