Fiscal folly

For years we’ve fought putting new taxes on Internet activities. But like a bad computer virus, that idea keeps coming back. The latest manifestation is what’s called the "Amazon tax." But it also would hit many more companies than online retailer Amazon.com, including hundreds of thousands of small businesses that sell online.

In California, the latest tax idea is Assembly Bill 153, by Assemblywoman Liz Skinner, D-Berkeley. The bill is so complicated that, even the Legislative Counsel’s Digest’s summary is a single, run-on sentence clot of 92 words of legalese.

Essentially, what would happen is this. Currently, Amazon’s sales in California are not charged California sales tax. That’s because numerous federal court rulings stipulate that such taxes can only be collected if a company has a "nexus" in a state – that is, an actual, bricks-and-mortar store, like Wal-Mart. Amazon doesn’t have any such stores in California.

Individual Californians, when they buy from Amazon, technically are supposed to pay the sales tax themselves. Few do.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed similar bills. It’s not known what Gov. Jerry Brown would do. He was governor in the 1970s when two kids named Steve — Jobs and Wozniak — started Apple Computer in their garage in what would become Silicon Valley. Today, Apple is the second-biggest corporation in the world.

Taxing the future would be another fiscal folly in a state that has committed too many of them. Instead, let’s keep the Internet free for opportunity.