KEVIN WILLIAMSON: “The current debate over the Internet sales tax — the woefully misnamed Marketplace Fairness Act — is not about companies like Apple, but about the next Apple. A giant such as Apple has the resources to calculate, collect, and remit taxes on behalf of each of the country’s 9,600 or so sales-tax authorities, and in fact it does so. But the compliance costs imposes by the Marketplace Fairness Act would place smaller upstarts at a distinct disadvantage, which is, I suspect, one reason that market incumbents such as Amazon support the tax. The real cost of taxes is not the revenue out the door to the taxman; it’s the revenue out to the door to the taxman plus all of the costs involved in complying with the tax code.”
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