SCOTUS internet sales tax ruling

image credit: usatoday.com

This SCOTUS decision will affect all of us. Sparta Report just announced its decision to close down its little sales center at its blogsite:

effective today, the Sparta Report Shop will no longer be in operation due to the disastrous decision by the Supreme Court’s “republican wing” to allow states to charge out of state businesses with sales tax. We are not interested in complying with 2.5 thousand and more localities and states and keeping track of the various stupidities of the corrupt local political tax wrangling.

Investors Business Daily has more:

Taxes: Whatever you think about the issue of taxing internet sales, the simple fact is that the Supreme Court has just guaranteed that people across the country will now be paying more in state taxes. It's hard for us to see how this is good news.

In its 5-4 decision on South Dakota v. Wayfair, the court overturned two previous rulings that prevented states from taxing sales of out-of-state companies. That meant a catalog company based in Maine didn't have to navigate 45 state sales-tax laws to figure out how much each customer owed, and then remit that money to the right states.

Brick-and-mortar stores have been trying to lift this ban for decades, because, they say, it unfairly tilts the playing field in favor of catalog and online retailers. 

According to the Government Accountability Office, this break cost states up to $13.4 billion in lost revenue last year alone. And, retailers say it cost jobs and hurt local economies.

Not surprisingly, Amazon.com  (AMZN), Shopify (SHOP), Etsy (ETSY), Wayfair (W) and other e-commerce stocks dropped on Thursday.

The Supreme Court ruling was notable not just because it did something it rarely does — namely, overturn previous decisions. (The most recent, Quill v North Dakota, was in 1992.) The court also split in a highly unusual way.

On the majority side were rock-ribbed conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who sided with Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion. 

But so did stalwart liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kennedy argued that the explosive growth of online retail rendered the court's previous rulings outdated.

Three of the other liberals on the court, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, sided with Chief Justice Roberts' dissent. Roberts argued that it should be up to Congress to make a change like this.

Whatever the merits of the decision, the Court's ruling means not only higher taxes for consumers, but higher prices.

.  .

More Taxes To Come?

Worse still, the court may have opened the door to letting states impose other taxes on out-of-state firms.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform argues that states could use this ruling to impose corporate taxes and even income taxes across state lines.

"If physical nexus is no longer required for sales taxes ,then it is no longer required for personal or corporate income taxes," he said. "Now, California (or any state or city that loses population through exit) can tax people and businesses who do their best to avoid that state or city."

If you think that's a fanciful prediction, you haven't been paying attention. State governments will take every opportunity they can to raise taxes — especially if their own residents aren't the ones paying them.

In the end, it makes Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts' dissent look all the wiser.

Read the rest of the IBD report here.

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USS Cod Birthday gun salute

Really Short video by Pat J Dooley on YouTube 

USS Cod Submarine : Happy Birthday

Fun announcement at Cleveland.com:

The USS Cod Submarine Memorial on North Marginal Drive will celebrate the sub's 75th birthday with a deck-gun salute and cake in ceremonies Thursday at 2 p.m.

. . .

The Cod, now a National Historic Landmark on Cleveland's waterfront, was launched on June 21, 1943, as part of the Navy's fleet of more than 250 submarines during World War II.

During the war, the submarine made seven patrol runs in the Pacific and sent 35,000 tons of enemy vessels to the bottom.

Its torpedoes sank 10 ships and damaged five others.

A martini glass painted on its conning tower represents the celebration after the Cod rescued the crew of a Dutch submarine that had run aground during the war.

The Cod was decommissioned in 1954 and opened as a floating memorial/museum in 1976.

More of the report here.

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Flag Day: “Remembering Old Glory”

Kimberly Bloom Jackson had some historical and current context for Old Glory at American Thinker:

. . . But how did Flag Day come to be?  Interestingly, in 1885, some 108 years after the Flag Resolution was passed, a 19-year-old Wisconsin schoolteacher named Bernard John Cigrand inspired his students at Stony Hill School to celebrate June 14 as “Flag Birthday.”  According to the Congressional Record, what we call “Flag Day” is believed to have originated with Mr. Cigrand, a teacher who cared enough to instill in his students a great appreciation for the American flag as a symbol of our God-given freedom.

Thanks to Cigrand, children across America have enjoyed Flag Day celebrations ever since.  In fact, in 1894 over 300,000 students turned out to celebrate June 14 with their small flags and patriotic songs throughout many of Chicago’s city parks.  This became a tradition of Chicago public schools.

Times sure have changed, haven’t they?  Today, there never seems to be a shortage of news stories about a school or university mired in an anti-American flag controversy.  In fact, it’s all the rage to call for a ban of the flag in the name of “inclusiveness.”  At the University of California, Irvine, least 60 professors reportedly signed a petition in support of their cultural Marxist protégés who wanted to ban Old Glory because they felt it “contributes to racism and xenophobia.”

Instead of imparting knowledge about America’s extraordinary founding principles that have given rise to the freest and most prosperous nation on earth, these tenured radicals actually think that socially engineered “inclusiveness” and “diversity” are greater virtues than liberty itself.  Well, as Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Luckily for us liberty lovers, we know better.  So as we fly our flags this year in celebration of Flag Day, let us not forget to remember the greatness of America’s founding, those who came before us that gave the ultimate sacrifice to defend it, and the historical significance of June 14.

Happy American Flag Day!

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Update: amnesty legislation

From NumbersUSA:

Last night, House GOP Leaders announced that they will hold two immigration votes next week -- one on Rep. Bob Goodlatte's H.R. 4760, the Securing America's Future Act. and the other on a compromise bill still being negotiated.

The details are light. It's possible that the version of the Goodlatte bill that reaches the floor is quite different from the one that NumbersUSA endorsed earlier this year. And we don't know the full details of the compromise bill, but we can say with near certainty that it won't reduce overall immigration numbers or mandate E-Verify.

Please be on the lookout for action alerts early next week as the details become more clear.

It seems that the GOPe Uniparty and RINO Paul Ryan are determined to ram some sort of amnesty bill down our throats. But President Trump has a pen.

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Media lies

Art credit: William DeBurgh at thedailycoin.org.

Some of the contributors to the American Thinker closely monitor the mainstream media, so you don’t have to. Here’s an extract from Timothy Philen’s “Trump vs. the Media”:

The jobs report numbers for May were stunning: unemployment dropped to an 18-year low of 3.8 percent, an unexpected 223,000 non-farm jobs were added, and year-on-year wage gains rose to 2.7 percent.  Black unemployment dropped to a record 5.9 percent, a month after Hispanic unemployment hit a record low of 4.9 percent.

The only thing more stunning was the mainstream media's announcement of this economic milestone, typified by NBC News's blaring headline: "Trump Breaks Protocol with Jobs Report Tweet."

It seems obvious now that we've reached a tipping point where the mainstream news media are so thoroughly intoxicated with animus toward this president that their journalistic sobriety is in a state of permanent collapse.  Evenhanded reporting is evidently seen as capitulation to the enemy.  Defending Trump in any way would, no doubt, be considered treasonous.

This isn't media bias anymore.  This is war.

. . .

[George] Will's highbrow jeremiads against President Trump delivered on cue to a smirking Lawrence O'Donnell or solemnly nodding Chuck Todd are hard to witness.  One almost expects him to hold up a copy of the day's newspaper to prove he's still an alive and happy hostage. 

It doesn't stop there.

The rest of this column is here.

Update on Dreamers amnesty

It’s on, it’s off, and even if the House passed a DACA bill, President Trump would surely veto it. At any rate, here’s the latest by Mike Lillis And Juliegrace Brufke at The Hill:

GOP staves off immigration revolt — for now

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday tamped down a Republican insurrection on immigration — at least temporarily — with vows to “put pen to paper” on a compromise bill to protect immigrants known as "Dreamers."

During a two-hour, closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol, Ryan and other GOP leaders urged their troops not to endorse a procedural move to force votes on solutions for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — known as a discharge petition — and instead give leaders more time to forge a compromise that can win 218 Republicans.

“The next step is to start putting pen to paper and get legislation to the floor," the Wisconsin Republican told reporters afterward.

The promise seems to have bought them some time in their search for an elusive DACA deal that can win the support of centrist immigration reformers and conservative hard-liners.

The new unofficial deadline appears to be June 12, leaving leadership just five days to craft legislation they believe can garner 218 GOP votes. Supporters of the petition are three signatures away from the number of members needed to bypass leadership and bring the “Queen of the Hill” rule to the floor.

Not good news, and it’s not much of a breather. The rest of The Hill report is here.

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