News: Greed hits a speedbump.

Straight from the catalogue of Dumb Government Ideas is the intarw3bz sales tax. See, the states, desperate for money to finance all kinds of stupid government projects, have been watching the e-Commerce goose lay a steady stream of golden eggs without any real way to get their fingers into the pie. Before the internet, revenue from catalog sales was small enough to safely ignore, but Amazon and eBay have dollar figures dancing in every politician's eyes. All that cash flow? Untaxed? Inconceivable!

So the politicians have been trying and trying to pass a law to tap the vein of all this e-Cash, and with the usual grace of politicians, too. Implementation? Heck, that's someone else's problem, as long as they get their money.

The problem is thus: Say I start an online business selling widgets. I'm going to have to somehow find out the sales tax laws of all fifty states, (which I'd call "Byzantine" except that I've read a lot of ancient history and never come across anything so complex in Constantinople,) and every month, mail off a check to the .gov in every single state that had a subject citizen try to save a dime by buying something online. Bear in mind that some states would have tax rates that varied by county, and others might tax widgets at a different rate, or not even tax widgets at all because of heroic petitioning by Colonial widget farmers. If it was a one-woman shop, I'd be spending all my time memorizing tax laws and mailing checks.

Apparently lobbyists have gotten that through to elected critters in at least a few states. I'd also like to think, although I don't hold out much hope for it, that at least one or two politicians realize that this would kill the goose laying the golden eggs. That would be a first.