Senators Push Online Sales Tax Legislation
by Capitol ConfidentialIn a move that grabbed attention among the technology and retail business communities, three senators—Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)—introduced legislation aimed at allowing states to require online-only, out-of-state retailers to collect and remit to states tax on sales made to residents of those states.
In a press release, the three senators touted their legislation as an effort to give states “the option to collect sales and use tax revenues from out-of-state sellers through a new, simplified tax system,” but “only if they adopt certain minimum simplification requirements and provide sellers with additional notices on the collection requirements.” The Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill also “exempts sellers who make less than $500,000 in total remote sales in the year preceding the sale.” It reportedly has the support of big bricks-and-mortar retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, as well as Amazon.com.
In multiple states around the country over the past year, legislators and officials have been looking to sales made by out-of-state, online-only retailers as a potential revenue stream capable of being tapped in order to help fill budget holes. California has been notably aggressive in pursuing a so-called “Amazon Tax,” which would force retailers like Amazon.com and O.co to collect and remit to the state sales tax on sales made to Californians.
However, such moves are likely unconstitutional as it stands, and fly in the face of Supreme Court jurisprudence, and notably the decision in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota. According to Quill, Congress can, and needs to, act to allow states to require collection and remittance from businesses with no physical presence in the state, which is exactly what the Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill would do.
The legislation is viewed by some fiscal conservative groups as an improvement over legislation previously pushed, such as the Main Street Fairness Act, introduced earlier in the year by Durbin. The Main Street Fairness Act approach attracted considerable criticism and its ability to be passed had been drawn into question by multiple observers. However, concerns remain for some groups about the potential for the new Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill, if passed, to facilitate some net, state-level tax increases—concerns that will likely be more warranted with regard to certain especially tax-happy states than others that are more tax-averse.
The funny thing is that a lot of Tea Party activists are now jumping on board the Gingrich bandwagon. A couple of years ago, the Tea Party movement was very much anti-establishment and Tea Party activists declared that they were sick and tired of "fake conservatives" and "RINOs".
Well, other than Mitt Romney, there isn't anyone left in the Republican field that is more of a "fake conservative" than Gingrich is. Gingrich is a big time "RINO" that represents just about everything that the Tea Party is supposed to be against.
It just seems inconceivable that a big chunk of Republicans would actually be thinking of voting for Gingrich at this point. Yes, four more years of Obama would be a complete and total disaster for America, but so would a Gingrich administration.
The following are 27 reasons why Newt Gingrich would be a really, really bad president....
#1 In 2008, Newt Gingrich did a television commercial with Nancy Pelosi in which he stated that they both agree that "our country must take action to address climate change". He now calls making this commercial "a mistake", but this is yet another example of the lack of sound judgment that Gingrich has shown throughout his entire political career....
#2 Newt Gingrich also worked with Nancy Pelosi to promote the idea of a national sales tax on energy.
#3 In a 2007 interview with PBS, Gingrich endorsed the idea of a "cap and trade" scheme to limit carbon emissions....
“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.”
#4 During this campaign, Newt Gingrich has loudly denounced Obamacare, but in 2008 he wrote a book entitled "Real Change" in which he endorsed an individual mandate for health insurance.
#5 In fact, earlier this year Newt Gingrich stated during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press that he still believes in an individual mandate. The following is from an exchange between host David Gregory and Gingrich during the show....
MR. GREGORY: All right, let me ask you about another hot-button issue in the Republican primary, of course, and that's health care. Mitt Romney having to defend his proponent--that he was a proponent of universal health care in Massachusetts, and specifically around this idea of the individual mandate where you make Americans buy insurance if they don't have it. Now, I know you've got big differences with what you call Obamacare. But back in 1993 on this program this is what you said about the individual mandate. Watch.
(Videotape, October 3, 1993)
REP. GINGRICH: I am for people, individuals--exactly like automobile insurance--individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance. And I am prepared to vote for a voucher system which will give individuals, on a sliding scale, a government subsidy so we insure that everyone as individuals have health insurance.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: What you advocate there is precisely what President Obama did with his healthcare legislation, is it not?
REP. GINGRICH: No, it's not precisely what he did. In, in the first place, Obama basically is trying to replace the entire insurance system, creating state exchanges, building a Washington-based model, creating a federal system. I believe all of us--and this is going to be a big debate--I believe all of us have a responsibility to help pay for health care. I think the idea that...
MR. GREGORY: You agree with Mitt Romney on this point.
REP. GINGRICH: Well, I agree that all of us have a responsibility to pay--help pay for health care. And, and I think that there are ways to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy. I've said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond...
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
REP. GINGRICH: ...or in some way you indicate you're going to be held accountable.
MR. GREGORY: But that is the individual mandate, is it not?
REP. GINGRICH: It's a variation on it.
#6 Newt Gingrich has made some very curious statements about Obamacare. For example, he recently made the following statement about the Obamacare law....
"Now there are about 300 pages that are pretty good"
#7 The truth is that Newt Gingrich is very, very soft on health care. Just consider the following excerpt about Newt from a recent Washington Post article....
In 2005, he sat down with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to make common cause over health care. He said he and Clinton “have the same instinct” on health care and praised the notion of a health-care “transfer of finances” from rich to poor. “I risk sounding not quite as right wing as I should,” Gingrich said at the time. “I’ve spent enough of my life fighting,” he added.
#8 Newt Gingrich voted for higher taxes on numerous occasions. While he was Speaker of the House, the amount of taxes collected by the federal government from the American people increased from $1.001 trillion to $1.511 trillion. Would the amount of taxes extracted from us increase by another 50 percent during a Gingrich presidency?
#9 In 2008, Newt Gingrich stated that he would have voted for the TARP bailout if he was still a member of Congress.
#10 In 2003, Newt Gingrich boldly promoted George W. Bush's prescription drug bill. Because of that bill, the federal government is now facing an additional 17 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities.
#11 Newt Gingrich is a big time Washington insider that is often paid huge sums of money for doing next to nothing. Gingrich has said that he was paid $300,000 for "work" that he did for Freddie Mac, but according to Bloomberg he actually earned somewhere between $1.6 million and $1.8 million between 1999 and 2008.
So what did he do for Freddie Mac? Gingrich claims that he warned Freddie Mac about the housing bubble, but the report by Bloomberg disputes this....
None of the former Freddie Mac officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Gingrich raised the issue of the housing bubble or was critical of Freddie Mac’s business model.
It turns out that much of the "work" that Gingrich was expected to do never actually got done....
Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with his work in 2006 say Gingrich was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.
He was expected to provide written material that could be circulated among free-market conservatives in Congress and in outside organizations, said two former company executives familiar with Gingrich’s role at the firm. He didn’t produce a white paper or any other document the firm could use on its behalf, they said.
#12 Newt Gingrich has also had a very "cozy" relationship with the ethanol industry. The following is from a recent NewAmerican article....
The cozy relationship Gingrich has with the ethanol industry led to his consulting business winning more than $300,000 in fees from the ethanol lobby after he left Congress. The Wall Street Journal noted April 27, 2011 that "Professor Gingrich says his ethanol support is grounded in his lifetime of studying history and intellectual problems, but what about that $312,500 from the ethanol lobby?... We've never suggested Mr. Gingrich has been bought off, though of course there wouldn't be an ethanol lobby to hire Mr. Gingrich if there weren't politicians like Mr. Gingrich willing to prop it up with taxpayer dollars, tariffs and mandates."
#13 Newt Gingrich is a firm believer in the job-killing "free trade" agenda of the globalists. Newt Gingrich voted for NAFTA and he is a staunch supporter of the WTO. He once made the following statement on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives....
"What we're being told is that free trade with Mexico would devastate the U.S. economy. With its low wages, Mexico would unleash a flood of cheap imports into our markets. There would be a mass exodus of U.S. factory jobs, as hordes of American companies fled across the border.... All this is scare talk."
#14 Newt Gingrich is pro-amnesty for illegal aliens. He has made statements on numerous occasions where he has advocated a "pathway to citizenship" for the millions of illegal immigrants that have been living in this country for an extended period of time.
#15 In 1995, Newt Gingrich actually promoted the idea that the War Powers Act should be repealed.
#16 Newt Gingrich seems very confused when it comes to abortion. Just consider the following statements....
A- "I believe most Americans are pro-choice and anti-abortion."
B- "I think that abortion should not be legal, and I think that how you would implement that I'm not sure."
C- "As with any public policy, the more strongly public opinion is swayed in defense of unborn life, the more our laws should and will change as a result."
#17 The following is how author Dick Williams described Newt's attitude toward pro-life issues when he became Speaker of the House in 1995....
Gingrich is opposed to abortion but does not believe the nation is ready to enact a constitutional ban. In the first three months of 1995, while the Contract With America was being debated, he angered some Republican congressmen by detouring them from anti-abortion amendments to bills and by putting aside their arguments that a welfare reform package might lead to an increase in abortions.
#18 Newt Gingrich supported the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that put a significant number of new restrictions on gun owners.
#19 Several of the Republican candidates are suggesting that the Department of Education should be shut down, but back in 1979 Newt Gingrich voted for the creation of the Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter.
#20 News Gingrich has said that he believes that we should have Singapore-style drug tests for Americans.
#21 How can we trust Newt Gingrich to manage America's finances when he has done such a horrible job managing his own finances. According to Politico, Gingrich once owed a debt to Tiffany Jewelry that was somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000. Politico tried to find out if this debt was still active but Gingrich was not willing to talk about it....
When asked by POLITICO whether Gingrich has settled this debt, and why he owed between a quarter-million and a half-million dollars to a jeweler, Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesman, declined to comment.
“No comment,” he said in an email.
#22 How can we trust Newt Gingrich to run America when he can't even run his own campaign? A few months ago, the senior staff of his campaign resigned en masse. It is literally a miracle that the Gingrich campaign has lasted as long as it has.
#23 For someone that preaches against debt, he sure seems to be able to rack it up. Back in July, it was reported that the Gingrich campaign was a million dollars in debt.
#24 Newt Gingrich was once fined $300,000 by the House Ethics Committee. An article in Esquire detailed why he received such a large fine....
His bitterness only deepened when the House Ethics Committee started investigating GOPAC's donations to his college class and caught him trying to hide his tracks by raising money through a charity for inner-city kids called the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation. Another charity of his called Earning by Learning actually spent half its money supporting a former Gingrich staffer who was writing his biography. Gingrich even gave out the 800 number for videotapes on the House floor. The Ethics Committee found him guilty of laundering donations through charities, submitting "inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable" testimony, and making "an effort to have the material appear to be nonpartisan on its face, yet serve as a partisan, political message for the purpose of building the Republican party." Seven years after he had destroyed Jim Wright for a lesser offense, the committee punished Gingrich with the highest fine ever imposed on a Speaker of the House, $300,000.
#25 Newt Gingrich has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1990. This alone should immediately disqualify him from consideration for the Republican nomination.
Former Congressman John R. Rarick once said the following about the Council on Foreign Relations....
The CFR, dedicated to one-world government, financed by a number of the largest tax-exempt foundations, and wielding such power and influence over our lives in the areas of finance, business, labor, military, education and mass communication media, should be familiar to every American concerned with good government and with preserving and defending the U.S. Constitution and our free-enterprise system. Yet, the nation's right to know machinery – the news media – usually so aggressive in exposures to inform our people, remain conspicuously silent when it comes to the CFR, its members and their activities.
The CFR is the establishment. Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also finances and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high-level decisions for converting the United States from a sovereign constitutional republic into a servile member of a one-world dictatorship.
#26 Newt Gingrich has been spotted attending meetings at the Bohemian Grove. I wonder what all of those evangelical voters that Newt is courting would think if they learned of the pagan rituals and mock child sacrifices that take place there every year?
#27 Many Republican voters are deeply troubled by the fact that Newt Gingrich has actually cheated on two different wives and is now married to a third wife. The following is how a recent CBS News article described his marital history....
When he was speaker of the House, Gingrich had an affair with Callista Bisek, then a young committee staff aide, while married to his second wife, Marianne Gingrich. He divorced Marianne in 1999. Eighteen years earlier, he proposed to Marianne while he was still married to his first wife, Jackie Battley, who has said that Gingrich told her he wanted a divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery.
When his second wife asked him how he could give speeches on family values while he was cheating on her, Gingrich is reported to have said the following....
"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say."
Newt Gingrich doesn't just have skeletons in his closet - he has a whole family of skeletons in his closet.
Hopefully the American people will realize that Newt Gingrich would be an absolute disaster as president.
This country is rapidly running out of time, and the 2012 election represents one of the last chances that we have to turn this nation around.
If America elects Newt Gingrich, we will stay on the same road that Clinton, Bush and Obama have been marching us down.
We simply cannot afford that.
Please choose wisely in 2012 America.
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