Once I got over my initial anger at this blatant reactionary anti-tax BS — wait, scratch that: I still haven’t gotten over it — I decided to write this letter to Mr. Cutler. Because I can’t find a mailing address or email for Mr. Cutler, I have posted my response in the Sellers forum of the eBay community, where, I might add, people are signing on to the petition mentioned in Cutler’s email. — docroc
Dear Mr. Cutler:
In re your email of May 7 in which you invite the recipient to join you in a war on state sales tax collection with the excuse that it would harm your "small" sellers, I point out that eBay, itself, is not a small seller: In 2017, you earned net revenue of nearly $10 Billion off these “small” sellers. It's understandable that you don't want anything to come between you and this avalanche of money, but states are having a really difficult time balancing their budgets because e-commerce has all but destroyed brick and mortar retail and the sales tax revenue that came with it.
Until recently, e-commerce shoppers were rarely charged sales tax and then only if they lived in the same state as the business or one of its offices. The GAO estimates that states could have recouped $8-$13 Billion in 2017 sales taxes had they been allowed to tax "remote" sales.
The fact is that this taxation issue is about the survival of American communities, which incidentally, is where most of us live. Clearly, you can’t remove an entire local way of generating economic activity and expect those communities to thrive, while a few big companies’ top shareholders become billionaires.
This is starting to change. Amazon, for example now collects the sales tax for at least 45 states and is working on improving this. It is true that they do not yet collect tax for their independent sellers, but this seems like only a matter of time.
Amazon does it. eBay could, too. If you're so darned worried about the "small" businesses which operate on eBay, then maybe you should donate a tiny amount of one year's profit to put a system in place that collects sales tax for each seller. Or how about supporting a national sales tax? That would be even cheaper to implement.