Marketplace Fairness Act Is A Bad Idea That Isn’t Fair

Rearing its ugly head again, the Marketplace Fairness Act has recently been reintroduced in this Congress by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY).  Don’t let the word “fairness” in the bill’s title fool you.  Under the auspices of fairness, the legislation empowers the government to extract even more tax dollars from the already weary taxpayers across the nation.  As Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) explains in a letter to Congress, “While achieving ‘fairness’ may be a laudable goal, it cannot be an excuse for increasing the burden on taxpayers.”

In addition to the gravest issue of higher taxes for taxpayers, a lot of other shortcomings exist in this bill. For example, it would create a bureaucratic, organizational nightmare for online retailers by imposing onerous, unreasonable demands on their business transactions.  As R Street Institute Senior Fellow Andrew Moylan explained recently in an op-ed, “…online retailers would be denied that convenient standard and would be forced to interrogate their customers about their eventual destination, look up the appropriate rules and regulations in more than 9,600 taxing jurisdictions across the country, and then collect and remit sales tax for that distant authority…Because they would now have to comply with the complex tax codes in more than 9,600 tax jurisdictions, remote retailers would be weighed down by substantial compliance burdens.”

Along with higher prices at the checkout, consumers will also face the threat of losing significant amounts of their personal information.  That’s because for the online retailers to begin collecting “the proposed remote sales tax, businesses would be forced to send personal information about their customers to a host of state revenue departments.”

Not only does this proposal pose an alarming privacy concern, the problem is exacerbated by the track record of the state governments along with their federal counterparts to effectively protect and guard against hackers who hope to steal all of our personal records.  Rather experience has shown that the greater the amount of personal data governments collect, the more likely and vulnerable citizens are to fraud. Assuming for even a moment that the government could successfully protect our information from hackers, we’re still faced with the reality that some government workers have proven to be less than trustworthy.

The government be it at local, state or federal level already has far too heavy of a hand imposing unnecessary burdens that restrict the way we choose to live our lives.  For this reason, it’s all the more urgent that taxpayers unite and tell Congress to stop this legislation from moving forward.  It’s a disaster in more than one way and no one should be subject to its wrath.