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... What the localities want to do with e-commerce is to impose a sales tax on goods purchased over the Internet. ... If the Internet was taxed no one would want to purchase goods over the Internet and the economy would suffer. The Internet should not be taxed.
In 1998, Congress passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act. The Act imposed a three-year prohibition on the imposition of state or local taxes on Internet access fees. ... The Internet Tax Freedom Act was passed to help simplify the taxation processes for more than 7,600 state and local taxing jurisdictions so that companies engaging in electronic commerce and other remote forms of commerce would not have to bear what they called an "undue burden" regarding tax collection. ... Nothing currently prevents a state such as Georgia from imposing sales taxes on its own residents on any items they purchase through mail-order catalogs or over the Internet for delivery and use in Georgia, unless the Internet purchase is for an item that is sold exclusively over the Internet with no comparable off-line equivalent. The state of Georgia has the largest population of people who shop over the Internet. ... Such taxes are very unpopular: 70 percent of online users are opposed to sales taxes on Internet purchases (Spakovsky, par. ...
A recent study by Ernst & Young estimated that there was a total of $20 billion of business-to-consumer sales in 1998 on the Internet. ... ” The Ernst & Young study also pointed out that: (1) an estimated 63 percent of Internet retail sales are intangible services such as travel and financial services or intangible products such as food and prescription drugs that are exempt from sales taxes in most states; (2) 11 percent of taxable e-commerce retail sales already result in taxes being paid by either vendors or consumers; and (3) 60 percent of taxable e-commerce purchases are for goods that would otherwise be purchased over the telephone or by mail from catalogs, sales that have always been exempt. ...
Nearly two-thirds of people who shop on the Internet say that they would make fewer purchases from online merchants if they had to pay a sales tax (Fridman, par. ... In findings of the survey, it showed that more than 80 percent of online buyers said products downloaded over the Internet, such as software and music should not be subject to a sales tax (Fridman, par. ... Online retailers and other Internet-based business opposed taxation of online sales and Internet services, arguing that this would hurt business.
Approximate Word count = 2034
Approximate Pages = 8.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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