Yes, but not every content needs to use these "tricks," I mean that if a news story just came out, it uses a hashtag related to the news, if a conspiracy theory comes out, is not a news but it must find a way to become popular, and the study reveals that they use hashtags and humor.
Why are you puzzled? "Doesn't work with rigid surfaces" shows it working with a non rigid surface.
Of course what the article says is a true system didn't work with a rigid surface, but they came up with something close.
You are correct, virtually every state has a law that says “If you buy something in another state and pay less sales tax than we charge, you owe us the sales tax we would’ve charged you.”
It’s called a ‘use tax’. In practice, nobody pays (personal) use tax, myself included.
So, all of those people going to Oregon to shop without sales tax and not paying use tax were technically breaking the law, not using a loophole. I’m not judging them, I don’t pay use tax either :)
Washington at least will refund sales tax paid for goods purchased in Washington for use exclusively outside of Washington if purchased by residents of US states and CA provinces with low sales taxes, if the forms are followed.
I understand it used to be possible to show ID in store and have sales tax not be applied, but now you need to submit receipts and etc.
Avoiding taxes. It's different. It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home. No crimes were committed.
It was a loophole that you could buy in Oregon specifically to avoid $1,000s in sales taxes.
> It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home.
It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.
They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.
It was the same for WA, so you're right, this was always (illegal) tax evasion, not mere avoidance.
AFAIK it's not that Oregon changed anything, either. It's that Washington passed additional laws that require out-of-state merchants to collect the tax when selling to customers in WA, and said out-of-state merchants complied.
Prior to this ruling, if you were a merchant in state A and you mailed something to someone in State B, you were not considered to have an economic nexus in state B, and hence state B had no jurisdiction over you to enforce sales tax collection.
Previous definitions of economic nexus involved having physical buildings or employees operating within a jurisdiction's boundaries.
South Dakota v Wayfair said that mailing something to a customer established economic nexus in the customer's jurisdiction, hence the merchant now has to register as a business in the customer's jurisdiction and collect applicable sales taxes and follow all the laws of that jurisdiction.
The whole ruling is weird though, because the justification came down to it's messing up the order of things, and since Congress can't be bothered to fix it with legislation, the Courts have to make up stuff to prolong the status quo.
I think the point was that interstate data sharing closed the loophole on evading use-taxes. Now states report to each other about large purchases. It's no longer possible to buy a car or tractor in Oregon and never report the unpaid sales tax back to Washington or California. They will know.
I was addressing the debate that that prompted over whether the situation before that was tax evasion or mere tax avoidance, but yes, the point about interstate data sharing is what that tangent spun off from several posts upthread.
The situation petcat described is tax evasion (illegal, since use tax is due in lieu of paying sales tax at point of purchase, assuming item is brought back to home state).
Tax avoidance is simply minimizing tax liability, completely legal.
If you do not pay sales tax on items bought in neighboring states, you typically owe your state use tax on those items. Many people simply did not report these purchases however, and this is evasion.
I don't think that follows at all. If a business is on the area and successful, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is the most successful business that could be there.
Credit cards are a huge benefit to customers because of purchase protection, chargebacks, and being able to spend money before you earn it that month. The merchants pay the fees because it gets them sales they wouldn't otherwise get.
"or buy something nice for themselves" like spending an evening playing a game with friends?
Of you are playing against strangers, it isn't on you what someone else did with their money. As for you, you works only play with money you are willing to lose.
Of course poker isn't for everyone.
