LePage Wants to Collect Tax on Internet Sales

Initially I was very happy to see LePage get elected, now I have some serious doubts about him. What goes wrong when people go to Augusta?

The internet sales tax has no correspondence between taxation and representation. There is no part of the transaction in which state services are involved which are not already taxed by another means. In one interview Lepage justifies the tax as making business more competitive for brick and mortar stores that lose business to the internet suggesting that online stores are getting more business because there is no sales tax ( and not about convenience ?) - so his argument is based in redistributing wealth and granting a "fair share". The reason why the tax is claimed to be due from the targeted economic sector is for no other reason than the government says so and not because the government has actually contributed anything that would qualify government as having earned their "fair share".

I was looking up "robber baron" for another discussion. I came across this definition on Wikipedia:

Quote:

Robber baron is a term used for a powerful 19th century American businessman. By the 1890s, the term was typically applied to businessmen who were viewed as having used questionable practices to amass their wealth. It combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy ("baron").[1]

The term derives from the medieval German lords who legally charged tolls on ships traversing the Rhine without adding anything of value. (see robber baron).

If the shoe fits......

Good point about small business and the ability to collect and amintainr ecords for each state, however, if you're savvy enough to sell through the internet, there's probably someone out there ready to design a program that auto posts your tax collected to the correct state at the correct rate and thus you never touch the money. Think payroll taxes and how they are deducted - no one really reaches in and takes the money it sort of floats and then is cleaned off by your payroll company. You simply write them one check to cover anything quarterly or pay as you go to build reserves needed..

The legislation doesn't call for taxing small businessmen- it is a tax the rich scheme- those businesses with receipts over 500000.00 - At least for now to get the foot in the door for this taxation without representation. Like someone said - I am sure that if they get away with this tax , it will soon enough apply to all so its good to know that there is software that can automatically transfer money into the
bloated government's coffers.

I buy auto parts online and pick them up at the local store front. I pay the tax but it is not as bad as the shipping and the wait for the brown truck, although some rare parts had to come that way.

I knew a woman who always touted this "fair share" crap but couldn't define just how much that was, 99% enough?

I bought a car years ago. I used it hard and last year hauled it to a salvage recycler yard. They wrote me a check for $400 and some dollars. As far as I know, that is now "income" and I declared the amounts on my taxes that I received for disposing of my own property that I had to buy and pay sales tax on in the first place.

If you want to really get me screaming though, it is charging me sales tax on the auto parts core deposit when I bring the part with me at the time of purchase of the replacement part. How the hell does the state justify sales tax on my worn out auto part I turn in.
Don't even get me started about the assessing of my outdoor wood fired boiler as a storage building. Its a furnace you idiots, not a storage building, they don't care, its my fair share...

On the other hand, I keep storing firewood in it and it keeps disappearing...Maybe I should file a police report (ongoing theft of firewood) and make an insurance claim...

What gets me is what the taxes are paying for- A state government ( not to mention federal) that has come to assert that its job is to act as the investment bankers of our economy and to choose special interest sectors that are the beneficiaries of those investments, which often means giving the special interest tax breaks as in the Pine Tree Zone which is a 100% tax break on personal and corporate income tax and an 80% "tax credit( meaning paid for by the Maine taxpayers) on payroll tax. I have never seen the retail sector included on any "targeted sector " list that the legislature creates for it's wealth redistribution centers. I even once read an article where in the. "expert" identified the retail sector as being too large a sector of the Maine economy which didn't bring in enough concentrated wealth.

So if the state is now a financier of the Maine economy- then why should it levy "taxes" on a sector which is completely excluded from the investment policies of our corporate state? If you look at the whole picture of the Maine government's management of the Maine economy, this effort to get taxes from online businesses that have grown with no help from the government highlights what is already generally true. There is one sector that is represented without being taxed and another that is taxed without being represented. Every legislative session new "funds" are created for the sectors of the economy that the legislature deems worthy of existing in their brave new world- that does not include the retail sector. Now they look to the retail sector as a new source of "free money" to fund their favored sectors- and more importantly to fund the huge bureaucratic layer of government that administers the wealth redistribution, many of whom have "quality jobs" ( legislative code for jobs with high pay and the best benefit packages)

I have never heard it suggested that this administrative layer that manages wealth collected from any available source and redistributes it to the favored ones should be cut to balance our budget. Instead it keeps on growing. One small example is the recent bill under consideration to earmark part of the state's" fair share" of casino profits for loans for milk producers. Someone here asked why it should be earmarked and not just go into a general fund to decrease the deficit. Good Question!

Kenny wrote:
On the other hand, I keep storing firewood in it and it keeps disappearing...Maybe I should file a police report (ongoing theft of firewood) and make an insurance claim...

Post of the week.
lol

To expand what I wrote in a previous thread. -

Those who write that the proposed law represents an expansion of federal power and - in contrast to the bill's rationale - an instrusion on state sovereignty are correct.

This is the foot-in-the-door to a national sales tax.

It will harm federalism by reducing the ability of states to compete in the realm of tax policy.

That was me- thanks for the further enlightenment.

Thank-you Economike and Mackenzie for brining up the point of "foot in the door" politics. In the last several weeks I have been opposing a local pre-K program due to costs. They keep saying it will "make money" because the reimbursement will be more than the cost. Arguments like that drive me nuts because it's a foot in the door. If they go ahead, how long before it morphs into something very expensive. Indeed, the legislation is a foot-in-the-door for the national tax.

After having lived abroad where the VAT was 18% (!), the poster above made me cringe.

Interesting to consider several different conversations taking place simultaneously on this board. One concerns the Brunswick Police Department's need for more space which brought up the MRRA, a corporation that was chartered by our legislature as a "municipal corporation" and an "instrumentality of the state" which is categorically a "quasi". which are structured to be whatever they want to be whenever they want to be it. As far as I know the quasi has no real legal basis but that is regarded as inconsequential by our legislature which is responsible for the proliferation of quasi'- private and non-provft entities that are all linked in some manner to the government.

In the case of the MRRA, the legislature, since chartering this corporation, has been trying to assert its identity as an "instrumentality of the state" over that of being a "municipal corporation". The MRRA has been having difficulty charging local property tax due to the legislature's desire to lose it's municipal corporation identity so that all power can be granted to the state. It posts on its website that it is a "non-local" government entity- in direct contradiction to what is said in the charter. Perhaps the legislature does not expect the public to actually read the charter and so believes that manipulating public perception suffices for getting around the charter that they themselves wrote - making the MRRA a municipal corporation for no other imaginable reason other than to get around Article IV Part Third , Section 14 of the Maine State constitution.

The state is a "non-local' entity while property taxes are locally based. The internet transactions are likewise non-local but in the case of internet the state is trying to assert its sovereign local rights to tax non-local transactions using the authority of (non-local) federal legislation. In relation to the federal government , the state government is local government. In relation to a municipality the state government is non-local. Property taxes are local transactions so In the case of MRRA the non-local "instrumentality of the state" has no authority to levy such taxes and yet the state is trying to use its "sovereign local authority" to levy taxes on non-local transactions taking place on the internet all with creepy mis-use of the concept of state sovereignty.( local sovereignty)

We don't expect consistency from our government in the age of the of "quasi" whatevers. That is the whole point of the quasi. They escape a consistent categorization in order to reinvent all the rules as a matter of convenience- by-passing rule of law.

Please pardon my ignorance, but the use tax must factor in here somewhere.
Wasn't that set up to help the state garner revenues with online, out of state purchases?

Yes- so how does it factor in? It strikes me as a case where the state owns the individual. I have not researched it but my meager understanding is that the use tax was created for the purpose of charging taxes on items a citizen purchased by mail order using the same justification that is being used for the internet tax, which is based in wealth redistribution and fair share and has no correspondence between taxation and representation. Why does the state have a right to tax an individual for anything they but out of state? Once again the state adds no value- does absolutely nothing to earn the money it takes. The state can decide at any time to tax us for crossing the street or whatever they want just by decreeing it to be so. They do not have to provide any service or representation for the money that they take and therefore they can keep on spending well beyond their means. Another case of taxation without representation. Similar to solving the debt crisis by printing more money.

What's the big deal with this? Maine already has a USE tax on the tax form for anything bought out of state that you didn't pay sales tax on, that would include the Internet.

I have a friend who was an sitting Representative at the State House. He bought a TV in New Hampshire for his son's house warming gift. He son was living in New Hampshire. He used his debit card. He got a letter in the mail from the Maine IRS demanding the taxes for the TV. He had to file an affidavit saying that at no time did the TV enter Maine or pay the taxes on it. How did the Maine IRS even know about it? Must have been through the bank and the debit card. This happened during Baldacci's first term... The government here in Maine has already done this kind of taxing. I'm a bit confused, I guess.

Lori, the difference is, the state cannot do their job so they want the merchants to do it for them, no pay, no lifetime benefits like MSRS only penalties for non-compliance.

I think the question "what's the big deal?" should have been asked a long time ago.Now it's just the status quo that the government can tax us without adding any value or even representing us That is why there was a Boston Tea Party.

Please pardon my ignorance, but the use tax must factor in here somewhere. Wasn't that set up to help the state garner revenues with online, out of state purchases?

Mr. Simmons -

Perhaps one of our resident constitutional scholars can answer this.

Meanwhile, my guess is that it's called a "use tax" to avoid the constitutional proscription against states taxing interstate commerce. The taxed activity is the Maine resident's "use" of a product while in Maine, not on the resident's activity of importing the product into the state.

Truly ridiculous- not only do they tax you when you buy something, they also tax you if you use it. Government gone mad!

It seems that Governor LePage is advocating for a national collection of sales tax that would then be apportioned back to the individual states according to how much their state residents had seen fit to purchase in other places across the land.

Some observations:

1) It is patently unconstitutional!

2) It is totally insane!

3) Anyone proposing such an affront to our Constitution and our freedoms should not have R after his name, or the Republican party has become the right side of the Democrat Big Government party.

Lots of consumer goods can be bought overseas. Is the United States going to send government goons to Russia to collect sales taxes on what some Maine citizens decided to buy over there. It is no longer a parochial market, instead the advent of the internet has made it a worldwide marketplace. Our leaders who rue the "self assumed" losses of (their) tax monies should have thought of this before they opened the flood gates with all this NAFTA and other trade agreements. Walmart is not the only company that can shop overseas, every single American with a computer can do the same now.

The horses are out of the barn guys, it is way too late for your internet sales tax shenanigans! Trying to pull this off only makes you look like the greedy politicos that you are. Sooner or later you are going to be forced to cut spending as there a few new sources of tax revenue around and this proposal is NOT one of them!

WC

Maybe the government of Maine could just ban the use of the internet within Maine to stop Maine citizens from purchasing online and regain their tax base that way... But then the government of Maine would have to give up the advantages that the internet offers to the state as well. I don't think our government would like that trade off- maybe they could make an exception for themselves and certain "targeted sectors" and just impose that restriction on the un-targeted or reverse-targeted sectors.

you don't pay a Use Tax AND a Sales Tax. If you buy something from out of state, you would pay a use tax if you didn't pay a sales tax. Same rates, same exemptions, etc.

That is just linguistic trickery to get around the fact that what is being taxed is a sales transaction. It is a concept that essentially makes the citizens of the state into the property of the state.

If taxes are supposed to be an exchange for representation and if sales taxes are justified as a payment for services that a state provides -ie, police, fires, road repairs, the state is not providing any additional service in internet web sales. The delivery of the purchased item is already being taxed. The income derived from the sale is already being taxed.

The sales tax repackaged in new language as the "use tax' cannot be justified on the ground of taxation in exchange for service or representation. It can only be justified on the ideology of redistributing wealth so that everyone gets their "fair share" according to a totalitarian government's world view.

LePage is using the fair share argument and pitting one sector of the Maine economy against another. In our case we are in both sectors- brick and mortar and online- but I see our online business as having the real growth potential in this day and age. So in our case LePage is arguing that he will benefit the part of our business that probably has a smaller growth potential (at least initially) at the expense the part of our business that has the higher growth potential. Our product is unique and so the sales tax only represents an increase in the price charged and our operating expenses and not a huge competitive disadvantage as such a tax would mean for some business that sell commonly available merchandise. Lepage's actions would likely cause successful web stores to locate in states with no sales tax and then the state of Maine loses the income tax from that business as well.( though I understand that it is people that are the property in this ideology and any business would still of to pay for the use of that human property to all state's that charge "use tax" )

Lepage being a successful business man must understand the trade off and so I see his rhetoric is a cover for desperation.. I think he has lost his direction, being spooked by the budget shortfall caused by the DHHS and so he has fallen victim to a desperate and wrong headed solution.

That is just linguistic trickery to get around the fact that what is being taxed is a sales transaction. It is a concept that essentially makes the citizens of the state into the property of the state.

Agreed. It's no coincidence that the "use tax" just happens to be the equivalent of the Maine sales tax on the out-of-state purchase.

I wonder: If a Maine resident owes a tax on goods brought into the state, what about a moving van full of furniture and appliances a new resident brings to furnish his house?

Here's the official Maine Revenues Services explanation:

" When does use tax apply?

"Use tax applies when sales tax has not been charged. A purchase made out-of-state is the most common type of transaction subject to use tax. For instance, if you purchased goods from a vendor located in Massachusetts, whether by mail order or by taking delivery in Massachusetts, use tax applies if the goods are brought to Maine for use here. A Maine resident or business does not escape sales tax by purchasing out-of-state."

It appears, then, the Maine use tax applies without exception to ANY goods purchased elsewhere and "brought into Maine for use here." There is no limit between the date of purchase and the date the tax liability is incurred, nor is there an exception for the use of the purchases prior to entering the state.

They should definitely charge use tax on furniture that is brought when someone moves into Maine from another state- because is they didn't bring the furniture, they would then have to purchase it here and pay sales tax on those purchases. By bringing their furniture from their former homes they are depriving Maine businesses of income and the government of Maine the sales tax on the newly purchased furniture. How unjust is that?

Sometimes they do think of everything . . this one's hilarious!

From Economike's post: "For instance, if you purchased goods from a vendor located in Massachusetts, whether by mail order or by taking delivery in Massachusetts, use tax applies if the goods are brought to Maine for use here. A Maine resident or business does not escape sales tax by purchasing out-of-state."

I don't think the use of MA was an accident. I mean, they couldn't use NH where all the savvy scofflaws shop. Which brings me to my point , , or plea . .

Michelle? Could you please set up another interview with the Governor? I'd like to know if he and the missus have ever been to NH. I'd also like to know, if he's succesfull with this effort, what he'll say to NH's Governor at the next convention. "What are you going to do with your cut?"

Thank you!

Inquiring live from Harry Reid's sales and income tax free NV. Now, off to the casinos with me . . stupid taxes are overdue.

It is a concept that essentially makes the citizens of the state into the property of the state.

Which is totally wierd, becuase except for this tax, and all the other taxes, and all the other laws where the state tells people what they must do and what they can't do, the state normally doesn't do this.

You sound like you are being sarcastic. Someone else explained the use tax meaning that Maine citizens are being charged for using property in Maine that they buy else where but that does not fit the situation described by Lori in post 45;

Quoting Post 45

I have a friend who was an sitting Representative at the State House. He bought a TV in New Hampshire for his son's house warming gift. He son was living in New Hampshire. He used his debit card. He got a letter in the mail from the Maine IRS demanding the taxes for the TV. He had to file an affidavit saying that at no time did the TV enter Maine or pay the taxes on it. How did the Maine IRS even know about it? Must have been through the bank and the debit card. This happened during Baldacci's first term... The government here in Maine has already done this kind of taxing. I'm a bit confused, I guess.

On re-reading it I see that he had a choice of sending an affidavit stating the TV was not used in Maine or pay sales tax to Maine. That supports the interpretation that our government is charging its citizens for the property they purchase in a sales tax free state but use in Maine while the demand for an affidavit can arguably support that the citizens of Maine are being treated like the property of Maine. The same justification can be used to institute a national sales tax. The federal government would be due a use tax on every object used in the United States. Ever hear of the Boston Tea Party?

Contrary to your claim that this would be the only instance of the Maine government treating the Maine taxpayer as property of the state, I beg to differ. As the Maine government claims it has the right to collect taxes on purchases made by Maine taxpayers outside the state of Maine , it is also freely using the taxpayer as a captive investor in the SEGF and treats that investment as a non-profit investment AND taxpayer money is used to fund an 80% of payroll taxes in the form of "tax credit" to any business that the state wants to lure into this state as provided in the recently transformed Pine Tree Zone. There are a plethora of such examples. If the state can invest the taxpayers money in a private investment corporation ( chartered by our legislature) without our consent and then turn around and collect additional taxes from the taxpayer for shopping across the border where there are no sales taxes, it is arguable that the citizens of Maine are being treated as the property of the state in the eyes of our legislature who concocts laws which grant tax free status to some and then try to collect unreasonable taxes from others in the most petty of ways. The legislature is not directly using the citizens as slave labor but all the taxpayer money that is being wheeled and dealed- giving huge tax breaks for some and then trying to figure out how to tax others in new ways- represents the fruits of the labor of the Maine citizen and there is a definite pattern in which there is one class that is represented but not taxed and another class that is taxed but not represented. That is the inevitable result of reams and reams of special interest legislation passed by our legislature and the plethora of "funds" earmarked for the use of those special interest and which have to be constantly fed.

If someone would hypothetically commit the high crime of purchasing an item across the border in a state that does not charge sales tax and then transport it to Maine, why would they then not commit another crime of lying on an affidavit? The only way for the government to be really sure that he did not transport the TV into Maine would be to send the state police with a search warrant to search his home. I am surprised they didn't do that with all those taxes at stake.

Maybe the state of Maine should just search all vehicles at the New Hampshire border.

"Maybe the state of Maine should just search all vehicles at the New Hampshire border."