Justice Stephen Breyer asked: "What does it cost for a mandolin seller who sells mandolins on the internet to sell them in 50 states?"
Justice Stephen Breyer asked: "What does it cost for a mandolin seller who sells mandolins on the internet to sell them in 50 states?"
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Start slow, fade early
so you suppose he is a Cafe member?
2012 Weber Bitterroot F5.
To help folks out who may wonder where this quote originated:
http://www.richmond.com/news/nationa...b9586be81.html
For retailers who help their bottom line through on-line sales, this should be a closely watched decision.
This will probably be debated by the same group of geniuses who, several years ago, decided that tomato paste on a pizza is a vegetable . . . .
"It's comparable to playing a cheese slicer."
--M. Stillion
"Bargain instruments are no bargains if you can't play them"
--J. Garber
So was it a rhetorical question, or did someone answer him? The article gave us the question but no answer.
Keep that skillet good and greasy all the time!
2012 Weber Bitterroot F5.
Justice Breyer has never bought a mandolin from me, as far as I know. But I would be glad to sell him one if he is interested.
I collect sales tax and file a state tax return for transactions in my home state. If I had to do that for 50 states it would drive me nuts. If the law is overturned, I would hope that online payment processors like PayPal and Square would build in tools to help their business customers process state & local sales taxes -- or that there would be an exemption for smaller operations like mine.
Emando.com: More than you wanted to know about electric mandolins.
Notorious: My Celtic CD--listen & buy!
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They obviously would have to if they wanted to survive. As I understand it the bigger problem isn't just the 50 states but the city sales taxes that some municipalities collect as well.
My state has a question on the state tax return where one must state if they purchased anything online and didn't pay the sales tax. It is, of course, strictly followed by the vast majority of tax payers...
"It's comparable to playing a cheese slicer."
--M. Stillion
"Bargain instruments are no bargains if you can't play them"
--J. Garber
Right, I think I heard that when you get down to the municipal level there are something like 12,000 different sales taxes nationwide. Obviously Mom and Pop do not have time to keep track of all that.
Emando.com: More than you wanted to know about electric mandolins.
Notorious: My Celtic CD--listen & buy!
Lyon & Healy Wood Thormahlen Andersen Bacorn Yanuziello Fender National Gibson Franke Fuchs Aceto Three Hungry Pit Bulls
I understand the desire to try to collect the taxes but it simply isn't practical, as mrmando indicated.
David Hopkins
2001 Gibson F-5L mandolin
Breedlove Legacy FF mandolin; Breedlove Quartz FF mandolin
Gibson F-4 mandolin (1916); Blevins f-style Octave mandolin, 2018
McCormick Oval Sound Hole "Reinhardt" Mandolin
McCormick Solid Body F-Style Electric Mandolin; Slingerland Songster Guitar (c. 1939)
The older I get, the less tolerant I am of political correctness, incompetence and stupidity.
And different states tax different things. Not to mention sales-tax-free-weeks, which CT and I think NY and NJ participate in occasionally. Talk about a mare's nest.
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1920 Lyon & Healy bowlback
1923 Gibson A-1 snakehead
1952 Strad-o-lin
1983 Giannini ABSM1 bandolim
2009 Giannini GBSM3 bandolim
2011 Eastman MD305
We have here in NY an overall state sales tax, and then various counties have differing additional sales taxes. Certain goods are tax exempt (groceries), others have stiff additional state taxes (tobacco products). In the age of computer data, it would be complex but not impossible to develop an overall "tax map" that told what taxes would need to be charged in each jurisdiction,. probably sorted by ZIP code. (However, some ZIP codes may cross county lines.)
Not sure how many "mom and pops" have significant interstate on-line commerce, but I've gone on several websites that proudly proclaim, "No sales tax." That may change; one of the charges Pres. Trump is levying against Amazon, is that Amazon customers don't pay local sales taxes. And it's probably true that the trend toward on-line sales is cutting into local sales tax revenues, to some extent. However, the vast majority of day-to-day purchases are not on-line, so they involve tax payments; for example, there are state and local taxes on all restaurant meals in NY, so your Big Mac contributes support to your local and state government.
Allen Hopkins
Gibsn: '54 F5 3pt F2 A-N Custm K1 m'cello
Natl Triolian Dobro mando
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If Justice Breyer does play mandolin, please tell me The Notorious RBG plays banjo, and they jam on their lunch break! She's known to be a huge opera fan.
I'm going to need a good attorney when this Mando-Gate thing blows wide open...
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. -- Aldo Leopold
I like to think that Justice Breyer is a Bill Monroe fan.
It will not be hard to collect and distribute sales tax. It will be as easy as inputting your zip code and software will calculate and distribute the tax when the payment is made for the item. I bet Amazon already has the capabilities and means to take care of it.
May those who love us, love us. And those who don't love us, May God turn their hearts;
And if He doesn't turn their hearts, May He turn their ankles, So we will know them by their limping.
It won't be hard from the consumer's point of view. But from the retailer's point of view, paying out all of those taxes to the various state governments at the end of the year will be a pain in the tuckus.
Emando.com: More than you wanted to know about electric mandolins.
Notorious: My Celtic CD--listen & buy!
Lyon & Healy Wood Thormahlen Andersen Bacorn Yanuziello Fender National Gibson Franke Fuchs Aceto Three Hungry Pit Bulls
On the other side of the honesty coin...
I once purchased a rare hard-to-find tech part, from a smaller independent out-of-state quasi-fly-by-night business who - oddly - had a mandatory "sales tax" (approximately correct for my region) added to the total bill.
But I've always wondered whether that business actually turned that "tax" money in to my state, or did the business just keep that money for themselves?
That would be a clever way for a seller to entice more customers to buy, offering initially lower prices, then tacking on fake "tax" fees, and probably no one would be the wiser.
In my case for that particular item, the total price was not high enough to discourage me from making the purchase - I would have bought the part anyway even if it'd been priced slightly higher but *without* any sales tax - but I've always wondered if they were running some sort of tax ripoff/scam thing.
As long as the various states didn't catch a small-potatoes seller in some sort of "tax"-collection scam, the customers would have no way of knowing (or would they?) that they'd paid a fraudulent charge which served no purpose other than to line the seller's pockets and/or reduce the amount of end-of-year paperwork the seller had to file with various states.
I didn't ask questions or stir up any trouble, I just went with the prescribed routine because I wanted that part and I didn't want to wait years for another one to turn up.
Preemptive comment: The anticipated suggestion would be to not buy from mom-n-pops or individual sellers that you don't 100-percent trust, or to just "don't worry about a few dollars". Maybe in the long run it doesn't matter anyway, except on principle. The thing about oddball rare items (in my case, I was seeking a particular obsolete part for a long-extinct model of early computing gear) is that they don't come up for sale very often if at all, so you're sort of stuck with trusting the seller or else doing without the item on the hopes that someday another one might become available... most such items have long since been sent to the landfill (in the days before e-cycling).
So I guess that would be a good reason to buy from eBay (?) instead of independents (?), at least eBay has some standard operating procedures in place?
David Hopkins
2001 Gibson F-5L mandolin
Breedlove Legacy FF mandolin; Breedlove Quartz FF mandolin
Gibson F-4 mandolin (1916); Blevins f-style Octave mandolin, 2018
McCormick Oval Sound Hole "Reinhardt" Mandolin
McCormick Solid Body F-Style Electric Mandolin; Slingerland Songster Guitar (c. 1939)
The older I get, the less tolerant I am of political correctness, incompetence and stupidity.
Well, Justice Breyer lives in my home state of New Hampshire which has a very active contradance scene. There are several dances with live stringband music every weekend. Including the dance in Nelson which has been held every week for hundreds (like 250+) years.
One cannot live in NH very long without hearing and seeing someone playing dance tunes on a fiddle, tenor banjo or... mandolin. Sometimes the bands are volunteer and ad-hoc. I'll keep my eye out for a mandolin player wearing a black robe and report back to the cafe.
David Hopkins
2001 Gibson F-5L mandolin
Breedlove Legacy FF mandolin; Breedlove Quartz FF mandolin
Gibson F-4 mandolin (1916); Blevins f-style Octave mandolin, 2018
McCormick Oval Sound Hole "Reinhardt" Mandolin
McCormick Solid Body F-Style Electric Mandolin; Slingerland Songster Guitar (c. 1939)
The older I get, the less tolerant I am of political correctness, incompetence and stupidity.
There already was a pretty good group with the name "The Supremes".
Mick
Ever tried, ever failed? No matter. Try again, fail again. Fail better.--Samuel Beckett
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