AMAZON AND STATE SALES TAX

Amazon, the huge internet marketplace for books and other useful things, does not want to pay sales or use tax. Amazon wants to be treated like a paper catalog company, which only charges sales tax to the people in its own state.

Amazon would not exist without BILLIONS of dollars of taxpayer money spent on developing and engineering what we now call the internet. The US generally allows such research to go into the public domain, which means that it is available for anyone to use at no charge.

So the taxpayers paid for most of the research used to build this neat-o thing called the internet.

You would thing that good corporate citizens would embrace the payment of sales tax as a way to repay us all for the opportunities that now exist to make money on the internet.

BUT NO. Amazon is going to amazing and rather shabby lengths to avoid paying sales tax.

I CAN NOT BRING MYSELF to order anything new from Amazon. Luckily there are A LOT of other internet companies to buy from.

BTW, historically, companies did not pay use taxes in large part because the accounting was such a pain. However, computers can now do such accounting in less than the blink of an eye. Again, most of the intellectual foundation for computers was paid for by us all and is owned by us all.