Last Friday, during the Vote-O-Rama on the Senate’s FY 2014
Budget Resolution, the Senate voted to approve an amendment
offered by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) regarding the online sales tax issue. Sen. Durbin announced “75 U.S. Senators
showed their support for the Marketplace
Fairness Act of 2013,” and characterized the amendment as “an amendment
summarizing the bill.” Many news reports
seemed to accept this portrayal implicitly, some even stating that the
amendment “mirrors” the Marketplace Fairness Act, or that it was a “vote to
include Marketplace Fairness.”
However, as we stated
earlier this week, the Durbin amendment does not a Marketplace Fairness Act
make.
The amendment’s actual wording says that it is for “allowing
States to enforce State and local use taxes already owed under State law on
remote sales by the amounts provided in such legislation.” Is this an accurate summary of the
Marketplace Fairness Act? Not
unless “summarizing” means getting to leave out all of the details that make
the bill so controversial in the first place. Does it “mirror” the bill? Not unless you use a mirror so blurry you are unable to make
out the most basic features.
CCIA has previously
listed
the many problems with the Marketplace Fairness Act: the inaccurate
commandeering of terms such as “fairness” and “level playing field” when the
result would be unfairly greater collection burdens for online retailers; the
mischaracterization of the physical presence standard as a “loophole”; the
misuse of “states’ rights” to justify actions that would actually subordinate
the interests and sovereignty of some states to that of others. The impassioned speeches given by
opponents of the bill on the Senate floor signify that these issues remain
controversial and still need to be deliberated by the world’s greatest
deliberative body. Rather than
disingenuously attempting to conflate support for a vague concept of use tax
enforcement with support for their own bill, proponents need to justify the
severing of physical presence from taxation, which the Finance Committee
Chairman called “revolutionary”, and the need to draft online retailers into
duty as nationwide tax collectors.
“We want the revenue and it’s convenient,” is not an acceptable answer
and this bill will not be ready until they come up with one that is.
