One of Amazon's biggest advantages over local stores and mega-chains like Walmart is its lack of sales tax in most states.
Amazon and eBay had it out in a public brawl in Washington on Wednesday during a congressional hearing about allowing states to collect sales tax on Internet purchases.
Amazon has struck a deal with lawmakers that will give the company one more year before it must start collecting sales tax on purchases made in California.
What do your 2010 online holiday shopping purchases have to do with the budget gaps many states are struggling to fill right now? In the eyes of some state and federal legislators, the sales tax that is not being collected by many online merchants is revenue that could help stem the bleeding of state treasuries.
Tennessee has the highest combined state and average local sales tax rate of any U.S. state, at 9.44%, according to a research group's report released Thursday.
Paul Volcker fired the shot heard around the world -- or at least around tax circles-last week when he delivered some bad news for anyone paying taxes. It's time, he said, to consider one more: the value-added tax -- the consumption tax used widely across the Atlantic.
This week, I posted a story on Fortune.com saying that a Value Added Tax is fast becoming the only option America has left to solve the current fiscal crisis. In the piece, I said that former Arkansas Governor and leading Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee favors a VAT to replace the income tax.
Shoppers in several states will be able to save money on back-to-school items this month during "sales tax holidays" -- but the temporary windfall comes at a hefty price for cash-strapped state governments.
The downfall of the American auto industry is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets from coast to coast.
Smokers have seen even more of their money go up in flames as state cigarette taxes continued to rise over the last year, according to a new survey.
Already thinking about all the back-to-school shopping you have to do this year for your kids?
With tax day just a few weeks away, there is no better time to cross your t's and dot your i's.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Over the past year, the tax panel appointed by President Bush to propose reforms for the U.S. federal tax code has considered revolutionary changes like scrapping the income tax and replacing it with a national retail sales tax.
If you don't care much for talk radio, or you don't live in the South, the name Neal Boortz might not ring a bell. But pay attention: Around 4 million people nationwide catch his radio show. It's N...
A bestseller advocating radical tax reform contains a critical flaw that misleads readers, according to a report in the October issue of MONEY Magazine.
If you don't care much for talk radio, or you don't live in the South, the name Neal Boortz might not ring a bell.
Consumers may finally be getting a break at the pump as some states moved to suspend gasoline excise taxes.
Marks and Spencer's decade-long battle for a refund on purchase tax paid on its chocolate-covered marshmallow Teacakes has again been sent to the European Court of Justice.
German conservative parties have unveiled their platform for expected elections in September, calling for a sales tax increase to finance employment tax cuts, plus looser labor regulations to fight an unemployment rate over 11 percent.
Ever since President Bush began pushing tax reform, policy experts have been wondering if he'd go euro.
ON FEB. 16, PRESIDENT BUSH'S bipartisan tax-reform commission had its first meeting. Much of the discussion focused on taxing consumption instead of income as a way of increasing saving and investm...
Imagine a world where April 15 is just another spring day.
The federal income tax code took another beating Thursday as Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan echoed the call for a broad overhaul of the current system.
HOW TO HANDLE GAINS, LOSSES AND DIVIDENDS
PRESIDENT BUSH HAS PROPOSED reforming both the Social Security system and the tax code over the next two years. His strategy is to deal with each issue separately--Social Security first, followed b...
Starting this year -- and for 2004 and 2005 only, under current law -- you can deduct either your state and local income taxes or sales taxes on your federal return as long as you itemize (and don't fall prey to the AMT).
Rep. Bill Thomas of California, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is the ultimate legislative poker player who keeps his hand shielded even from partners.
President Bush has two big ideas about your tax bill.
In his second term, President Bush is proposing major changes he says will strengthen the economy. Included is an overhaul of the tax code, and privatizing certain aspects of social security.
PRESIDENT BUSH HAS PUSHED THROUGH SOME DELIGHTFUL changes in the tax code over the past four years: lower income tax rates, rebates, and increased business depreciation allowances, to name a few. I...
President Bush has two big ideas about your tax bill.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - With two months left in the year, there's still time to trim your tax bill for 2004, or at least keep it from being unnecessarily or unexpectedly high.
CLAIMING THAT VICTORY HAS BROUGHT him a wealth of "political capital," President Bush now pledges to spend part of the bounty on a massive overhaul of America's byzantine tax system. Bush is alread...
The untold story from last week's Republican victory was the ineffectiveness of the left's attacks on right-wing reform.
All campaign season, both President Bush and John Kerry have pledged to cut the federal budget deficit in half. That promise may sound impressive, but at the state level it likely has prompted a fe...
President Bush and other Republican leaders have been talking about abolishing the IRS and replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.
A dozen states are temporarily eliminating sales tax for the back-to-school shopping season, according to CCH Tax and Accounting.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Whether you're talking income tax, property tax, sales tax or any other tax, your home state (not to mention your hometown) can have a decided effect on your bottom line.
Don't snicker at the effort by 19 states this year to collect Internet sales tax. You'll be sorry.
If you order something on the Internet, you probably have to pay shipping costs. But at least you don't have to pay sales tax, right?
Chalk up another one for President Bush. First he dispatches Saddam Hussein. Then he celebrates with a Top Gun landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln. Next he jawbones Congress into passing the ...
This February a number of online retailers, including Wal-Mart.com and Target.com, began collecting sales taxes from customers across the U.S. While this seemingly undramatic event didn't draw much...
They're coming. It's no longer a question of if, but when and how. No, not the aliens, but Internet taxes, which have been alien to the Net thus far. Derek Bulkeley--who runs San Francisco online a...
One measure of the progress of John McCain's come-from-behind candidacy is that the pundits of the world are starting to take potshots at him. In mid-February, for example, MIT professor Paul Krugm...
To hear all the whoopin' and hollerin' at the Republicans' "Scrap the Code" road show in Dallas last November, you would think you had happened upon an evangelical revival. "It's almost a religious...
As midwinter gusts blow in a new year, here's some news that's sure to toast taxpayers' mittens: State legislators and governors cut taxes by $3.3 billion in fiscal 1996 and approved another $4 bil...
What should it be--flat tax, sales tax or some sweet simple solution that hasn't surfaced yet? A third of you want a flat tax, with wrinkles. Another third want a national sales tax, and the rest f...
"THIS MUCH IS CLEAR: SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE." WITH THOSE words, I attempted to express your profound displeasure with our convoluted income tax code while testifying on your behalf before the Hous...
First, a little-known fact: The capital gains tax doesn't bring in all that much money for the U.S. government. It's been raising between $25 billion and $30 billion per year in the early Nineties-...
FASHIONING A FAIR AND SIMPLE TAX
The cataclysmic changes that sometimes rock the cozy world of Washington, D.C., usually begin quietly in the cities and towns of America, barely detected by pollsters and journalists. One such shoc...
As we scramble to collect our w-2s, 1040s and Schedules A through Z in advance of April's tax deadline, who among us hasn't cursed the federal income tax code? It is mind-numbingly complex. It disc...
Everyone knows about proposed middle-class tax cuts--but that's small change compared with other reforms brewing on Capitol Hill. The way you pay taxes may soon be radically altered, with the basis...
Taxpayers have good reason to toast the new year. in 1995 they will get more relief from state taxes than at any time in at least a decade. According to Money's annual 50-state tax heaven/tax hell ...
You've probably heard the pitch: Buy out of state directly or through mail-order catalogues and save the sales tax you'd have to pay otherwise.
WANT TO PIN a face on America's persistent deficit and savings crisis? Forget those hoary cliches -- the welfare queen, lazy bureaucrat, greedy businessman, weapons-crazed general, or rich Third Wo...
As the summer travel season nears its peak, millions of U.S. tourists are pouring into Europe. Unfortunately, a good many of them will forget something on their way out: a refund on Europe's value-...
IN THE MIDST of the most critical political battle of his presidency -- the down-to-the-wire struggle to push his budget plan through Congress -- Bill Clinton met in the Oval Office with FORTUNE ma...
OVER A FAST FIVE DAYS in April, the value-added tax went from trial balloon to lead balloon. But don't be fooled. You will be hearing much more about the VAT, a kind of national sales tax, and the ...
Everybody knows that sales taxes are regressive, taking proportionately more from the poor than from the rich. Now comes Princeton economist Gilbert Metcalf to argue just the opposite: Poorer peopl...
Amid all the confusion, here are at least six things you can count on from Bill Clinton's revolutionary -- and still evolutionary -- economic plan.
Beware if you're a winner earning more than $200,000 or a ''sinner'' who likes to have a cigarette at the end of a three-martini expense-account lunch. Among the overwhelming number of 16,200 respo...
Who would have guessed? Some of the best-kept secrets in tax planning are hidden in the dull and daunting instruction booklets published by state tax departments. There, amid jargon-jammed sentence...
With this issue, MONEY launches a monthly readers' poll. In these pages, we will ask for your opinions on matters ranging from how to improve the quality of the nation's public schools to the best ...
DOES THE ECONOMY need a deficit-swelling shot of fiscal stimulus -- a combination of new infrastructure spending and investment tax credits -- to get it rolling again next year? When Bill Clinton p...
GEORGE BUSH maintains that there's a ''Grand Canyon of difference'' between himself and Bill Clinton, whom he tars just another ''tax-and-spend liberal.'' Clinton returns the favor, blasting Bush a...
AMERICANS don't save enough, and they don't invest enough in plant and equipment. Say that to almost any economist or politician -- liberal, conservative, progressive, supply-side, or neo-whatsit -...
No place is perfect, of course, as the table below shows. Here you'll find how each of our top 10 metro areas rates in nine broad categories, with 100 points representing the best possible score. T...
Yes, taxpayers, it must be an election year. When else would President Bush, Congress and leading Democratic presidential candidates all suddenly discover that the overwhelming majority of voters -...
Last April, a new job enabled Leland and Kathy Rhodes to flee the gathering gloom of tax hell in California for the pristine uplands of tax heaven in Wyoming. Today, as the $60,000-a-year chief fin...
Okay, so you splurged on that $1,000 porcelain vase when you were in Japan and figure it was a good buy even after paying the $66 U.S. Customs Service duty. But imagine your surprise six months to ...
NOW THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IS over, it's time to turn our attention to another kind of campaign: the annual battle to keep the taxman at bay. It's too early to know what the second Bush adm...
THEY'RE AT IT again in Washington. After setting new lows in political ! discourse during last year's debate over the budget deficit, both parties want to tinker with the tax code some more. With '...
Remember that $2,000 custom-made suit you brought back from your last trip to London? You filled out the declaration card on the plane and upon arrival paid the 7 1/2% duty to the U.S. Customs Serv...
Here we go again, ranking America's hometowns and rankling just about everyone in the process. After you scour our list of the 300 largest U.S. metropolitan areas on pages 82 and 83, you may react ...
In New York City, the high-stepping Maud Frizon shoes pictured above will set you back $385 plus tax. Buy a similar pair in Paris, and you save more than $70. The secret? VAT, or value added tax, r...
Imagine how state and local governments would fare if they taxed services as extensively as they do goods. The 100 biggest diversified service companies alone had revenues of $329 billion last year...
THERE'S A CURIOUS deja vu -- even voodoo -- about the tax debate in Washington these days. Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has stunned the city with an immodest proposal to cut payroll t...
For George and Deborah Courtovich, the road to lower taxes turned out to be the 50 miles of highway between Somerville, Mass. and Stratham, N.H. In 1986, George, now 27, finally had enough of Taxac...
What a difference a year makes. Last year, in our second annual survey of the best places to live in the U.S.A., Danbury, Conn. headed the list. This time, mirroring the shift in strength of the na...
THEY SUPPORTED BUSH overwhelmingly in the election, but now that he's about to become their President, America's CEOs have stern talk for him about the deficit. Cut it, they say. Cut spending in al...
THE LONG-RUNNING BOOM in Southern California is the stuff most chambers of commerce can only dream of: a soaring population, office buildings sprouting everywhere, and prices on some single-family ...
Start thinking up ways to cut your taxes over the next few years. Most tax specialists agree that the pressure to reduce the $150 billion federal budget deficit will lead Congress to raise taxes on...
YOU KNOW they're going to do it. They say they won't, but they will -- later, after they're safely elected. When their backs are up against the wall, when their best-laid plans are thwarted by self...
SO YOU THINK a recession is bound to come before the end of next year. The expansion is aging -- it's so ancient it's creaking, you say. Well, think again. We're here to tell you it still has a way...
IT'S HARD TO SPOT Vice President George Bush without an economist at hand. The Yale Phi Beta Kappa in economics figures that distinguished conservative thinkers can help him convey an upbeat econom...
Joseph Laurenzano thought he had done everything right. On a recent stopover in Rome, the 68-year-old retiree from Belen, N.M. checked his luggage at the Termini train station and shifted his walle...
FOR BUSINESS lobbyists, it's time to play defense. With Democrats in control of Congress and the President's clout not what it used to be, this is not a good year to be pushing bold initiatives or ...
I take exception to your advice in ''The Simple Science of Keeping Tax Records'' (March) that there is absolutely no need to keep sales tax records any longer, since the federal income tax deductio...
Even at this late date there are some tax-saving tactics you can use as you confront your 1040 for 1986. Do not miss a single deduction or credit you are entitled to take. You may not get another c...
IF COMPANIES clipped by the new tax reform act were to follow the standard drill in responding to changes in the tax code, they would proceed as follows: First they would aim to get some redress in...
Barring some totally unexpected event, the tax bill that just last April seemed ready for a body bag will shortly become law. You therefore have only about three months left this year to take advan...
For the international traveler who long ago wrote off duty-free airport shops as dubious bargains or boring disappointments, the time has come to think again. Eager to capture more of the money tha...
Between now and April 15, millions of Americans will sit down to wage their annual battles with the Internal Revenue Service and their consciences. They will marshal their W-2 forms, bank statement...
DON'T COUNT the Gipper out yet. Toward the end of the fourth quarter of 1985, Congress had Ronald Reagan staggering. Even teammates wondered if the Reagan magic was gone for good. Then wham! With t...
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