Taxing the Internet

The tax collectors and liberals in Colorado have dreamed up a scheme to tax the Internet.

HB10-1193 seeks to force Internet retailers, like Amazon and Ebay, to collect sales tax from Colorado customers.

The problem is the Supreme Court, in Quill v. North Dakota, says that they can’t make them collect the sales tax, so someone came up a new way to use the regulatory authority of the state to make Amazon and Co so miserable that they’d say “uncle” and just start collecting the sales tax for Colorado “voluntarily”.

Here’s how the regulatory proposal works:
Internet retailers will have to tell their customers every time something is bought online that the customer owes “use” tax to the State of Colorado. Use tax, little did I know, is owed on any item purchased for which sales tax is applicable but not collected. No, really. Failure to make the notification results in a $5 fine per occurrence.
Internet retailers will have to notify customers once a year by mail what their annual purchases were and that use tax was owed on those purchases.
And the pièce de résistance is that the Internet retailer will have to submit to the State of Colorado a list of everything that you bought online! YIKES!

That’s right, Big Brother, aka Dept of Revenue, wants a list of everything that you have purchased on line so they can send you the bill for sales tax.

They will want a list of all the books you bought, all the movies you bought, Valentines presents, and you name it. It just gives me the shivers.

Remember how the ACLU howled when the Patriot Act sought to access library records with subpoenas? Haven’t heard from them on this one yet.

Taxing the Internet is really the Holy Grail of tax and spend liberals. You are going to have to pay the bill and lose the liberty.