Bloomberg News has story about the genesis of South Dakota’s Main Street fairness tax bill

There’s an interesting story that was posted about the NCSL, and the NCSL staffer who helped State Senator Deb Peters bring a level playing field for South Dakota’s Main Street stores when competing against Internet vendors:

Behlke, director of budget and tax, took on many tasks in his eight years with the organization. He considers his work in advancing South Dakota Sen. Deb Peters’ (R) online sales tax statute (S.B. 106) as one of his greatest achievements.

That law would eventually become the focus of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 21 ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair. In the ruling, the high court tossed out Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, its disputed 1992 physical presence threshold for when states could tax remote sales, and suggested strongly that South Dakota’s economic nexus threshold of annual in-state sales exceeding $100,000 or 200 separate in-state transactions would pass constitutional muster. More than two dozen states have established economic nexus laws, many of them identical to South Dakota’s.

and…

“South Dakota was actually my assigned state at the NCSL, and in 2015, Senator Peters and I discussed challenging Quill and the physical presence rule. We then met and discussed the idea with South Dakota’s attorney general and other state officials before the senator introduced the bill in January 2016,” Behlke said. “After we met with a group of South Dakota lawmakers to discuss the statute, the most common question I got was ‘why can’t we vote on this today?’”

Read it all here.

10 thoughts on “Bloomberg News has story about the genesis of South Dakota’s Main Street fairness tax bill”

  1. Sen. Peter’s will always be associated with implementing a new tax onto the citizens. Taxation without representation.

    1. Have you read South Dakota statute? You have always been required to pay sales tax on internet purchases.

      1. I’ve read it, but I would bet 99% of people never paid it. So for those, it is a new tax. It is no longer easily avoided.

  2. What new tax?

    This is just emforcing the law..I thought republicans were for enforcing the law

  3. This issue should have been resolved in Congress. It is the only body with the Constitutional authority to regulate trade between the states.

  4. If we were required to pay it we wouldn’t have to hold a special session to change laws.

    I love how all of these people who never paid the tax are out there saying it’s been a law for years. The Argus reports:

    State data indicates that 156 individuals voluntarily paid use tax in fiscal year 2017. That totaled about $50,000, but it’s unclear whether all of the funds came from online purchases.

    156!!!

    Why weren’t all if these people who say it’s all about fairness paying it?

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