I know alot of people may initially read this and think "Oh, Christ, what a needless tax" but consider:
The internet is not a fledgling market in the way it was 10 years ago anymore. More and more, people are purchasing from the internet to do a larger and larger percentage of their shopping. The problem is, the internet is still a bit of untouched territory when it comes to taxes. Some might consider this a good thing, but it places an extreme burden on small and local businesses.
One has little to no incentive to purchase locally when all the products you could buy out of state are virtually untaxed. Some larger internet businesses are able to offer their products at very low prices to eat up the competition, with virtually no taxes on them. Some internet businesses even offer low to no shipping costs depending on where you buy from.
This is great for internet businesses that already have very low operating costs, but not so great for smaller businesses who have to pay for space and, in all likelihood, more employees, all the while trying to compete against a market that has no sales tax on it.
As a customer, what would you do?
The obvious solution to that is to abolish the taxes on the "small and local businesses", not to extend taxation to harm internet businesses just like we've been harming local businesses.
