Would widespread taxation of Internet transactions threaten personal privacy?
Quite possibly. There are good reasons to be concerned about the threat to privacy from proposals to tax e-commerce, especially the proposal of the National Governors’ Association. This year, the state of Michigan, in an effort to collect “use” taxes, inserted a line (Line 30) in 1999 state income tax forms which specifically requests that citizens report their total online and interstate catalog purchases and pay the six-percent tax. It is highly unlikely that Michigan citizens will suddenly begin to tally the transactions they made last year via the Internet, catalogs, mail order, or 1-800 numbers and pay the tax, but the very insertion of Line 30 introduces a fundamentally new element in sales and use tax collection. It strips away the traditional anonymity of the taxation of personal purchases. Heretofore, one of the positive features of a sales tax (or a use tax, for that matter) has been that it is a fairly anonymous tax. When you make a purchase in a store, you pay the tax to th
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