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Court kills Amazon Tax

Posted by Richard on April 3, 2012

Woohoo! Colorado’s so-called Amazon tax has been ruled unconstitutional by the U. S. District Court in Denver:

In 2010, the Democrats in Colorado, in violation of the state Taxpayers Bill of Rights, passed a variety of tax increases known as the Dirty Dozen.  The state’s highly politicized Supreme Court gave the tax increases a pass around TABOR’s requirement for a citizen vote, but the federal courts are frequently a different matter, and so it has proved with one of the measures, the so-called, “Amazon Tax.”  That tax applied the state sales tax to sales by Amazon affiliates in the state, on the dubious proposition that the presence of a person who either owns a website (which could be hosted anywhere in the world) or who sells web ads constitutes a significant physical presence in the state.

Now, a federal court has decided that the tax violates the US Constitution:

On Friday, the federal court in Denver declared the 2.9 percent tax on purchases unconstitutional on the ground it was tilted unfairly against out-of-state retailers, and that it put an undue burden on retailers to either collect the tax owed by consumers or report consumer purchases to the state.

Judge Robert Blackburn’s ruling noted the legal language of the tax didn’t distinguish between in-state and out-of-state businesses, but the practical effect of the tax did.

“I conclude that the veil provided by the words … is too thin to support the conclusion that the Act and the Regulations regulate in-state and out-of-state retailers even-handedly,” Blackburn wrote.

The court applied what is known as the “negative Commerce Clause,” the notion that if regulation of interstate commerce is explicitly delegated to the Federal government, then it cannot be exercised by state governments. …

After the tax was enacted, Amazon simply terminated all affiliate relationships with Coloradans, so the socialist scum who enacted it gained no revenue as a result.

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