Wal-Mart’s Total Tax Hypocrisy

John Seiler:

The biggest corporate backer of the “Amazon tax” has been Wal-Mart. The tax was imposed as part of last June’s California state budget deal. It’s supposed to slam Amazon.com for not paying state sales taxes. Instead, it slammed 25,000 small businesses, “affiliates” that used Amazon’s merchant portal.

Wal-Mart griped that it was unfair that Amazon not pay the tax, but Wal-Mart had to. Now, it turns out that Wal-Mart also is a tax scofflaw:

The Walmart.com site, based in Brisbane near San Francisco International Airport, offers hundreds of products from a third-party retailer, CSN Stores in Boston, that are sold without collecting taxes when state residents buy them.

Wal-Mart insists that it’s not its responsibility to require companies that sell products through its site’s Marketplace Retailers program to collect California sales tax, even though the billing and the credit card transactions take place on Walmart.com.

Well, that’s that Amazon said, too, about its affiliates. But that didn’t prevent the tax-obsessed state government — cheered on by Wal-Mart — from imposing the new tax and destroying 25,000 state businesses.

Businesses need to stop using government to attack one another. And they need to stop attacking their customers by working for tax increases of any kind.

After all, how does Wal-Mart think those 25,000 killed businesses are going to get money to buy stuff from Wal-Mart? Another government stimulus, perhaps?

Your eyes on California Government

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