Trump issues odd tweet about Amazon and taxes

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By Rich Mitchell

President Donald Trump posted Tuesday morning a confusing statement about retail behemoth Amazon and taxes.

“Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!”

Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

Amazon pays sales taxes in every state that has a statewide rate and has for several months now. Surely Amazon is collecting, paying and remitting payroll taxes and one would expect that, unless given special deals by regions in which it operates, it also pays its state income and local property taxes. It is not immediately clear how Amazon has a tax advantage over other retailers.

Many online retailers do not pay sales taxes and are not required to unless they have a physical presence in a state the collects the tax. Perhaps Trump was making a statement about online retailers in general and picked a bad example.

Is this his push for an online sales tax bill?  Several efforts to require online retailers to collect and remit sales tax have failed to pull even symbolic support in congress.

Opponents say that forcing retailers to collect rates for hundreds, if not thousands of different city, county and states is a burden that smaller retailers would be unable to handle. Different forms, processes, and rates in each state would also complicate their ability to do business.

Supporters of the measure believe that online retailers who do not collect sales tax are offering the same products as local retailers but at an automatic discount. Considering the effort the local retailer has to collect, process and remit sales tax monies, there is a cost at the local level that many online sellers do not have to deal with.

The complication of sales taxes in an online world may not be as onerous as opponents claim. Software, such as TaxJar, integrates with e-commerce software and automates the collection and remittance processes making it transparent to the seller and consumer.

While it is not completely clear what the president meant by his tweet, Amazon may not have been the best target.

The article Trump issues odd tweet about Amazon and taxes is original content from Conservative Daily News.

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