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New Hampshire vows war on Massachusetts over sales tax collection
By adamg on Fri, 06/05/2009 - 9:38am
Legislature passes law to protect businesses that refuse to hand tax data over to Massachusetts; action comes after Massachusetts sues New Hampshire company with stores in Massachusetts over NH data.
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Comments
I am so loving on NH right now
NH or Cali, gotta figure out which state to move to. Both have problems. But they're way easier business environments for a startup than MA... by a lot.
loving on?
Um... you might want to rethink your grammar.
I did rethink it
"Loving on" is a contemporary expression pulled from a youth/texting-focused/slangy subset of the American popular culture here in 2009, where I live. The phrase has even leaked into headlines in "proper" publications [1]. I don't approve of its use in such formal contexts, as such usage seems an endorsement. Endorsement of otherwise-transient colloquialisms may further their spread into everyday usage, and thus their sticking power, when they are perhaps best enjoyed for a time and then discarded when others come into favor. In that regard, I trust that I'm with you in the thought that some forms of word pollution are undesirable.
In the current matter, I'll diagram it at the expense of that happy moment when I wrote those words so freely, as there seems no other effective means of retort. I did "rethink it," for a second or two. I remembered that these discussions are ephemeral, and that prosody and lightness make words considerably more fun to write (if not to read). BTW, [2] the parenthetical aside in the previous sentence is there as a nugget of self-effacing humour, a quiet nod to those who are easily tired by tirades of this sort.
And wouldn't little communication nuggets - such as these online discussions - be the doggone mostest boringest things ever if writers were confined to the strictures of perfect grammar ("as defined by whom?", one might ask) every time they laid fingers to keys?
Grammar police, go back to bed. Your game shows don't start for another half hour.
[1] http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles...
[2] http://www.abbreviations.com/BTW
Rest assured, anon
No messy cleanup.
AHAHAHAHA! Yeah, ZBert,
AHAHAHAHA! Yeah, ZBert, hate to be the one to break this to you, but if you own a house in NH, the property taxes more than erase what you don't pay in sales taxes.
A HA A HAHAHAH
I don't ownb a house in NH and a quick check suggests that those higher property taxes dont' translate into higher rents in any harmful way.
Also, the business overhead in MA is so intense that it really dwarfs, in the big picture, the impact of property tax on an ordinary home anyway.
Not exactly...
Hate to burst your bubble, but there's a HUGE difference between the property taxes I pay to my town and the income and sales taxes I used to pay as a MA resident.
Local property taxes are collected locally and spent locally. Spending is voted on at the local level. Don't want to pay higher taxes? Get your friends and neighbors together and vote against higher spending.
When taxation and spending are dealt with at the local level, out of the reach of career politicians in a fancy building 100 miles away, it is the people who have the final say as to how much money gets taken out of their wallets, and how that money is spent to best serve the community.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have states like Massachusetts, where the amount of money the state takes away from you is determined by lawmakers who care more about acting in the best interest of their wealthy, special interest campaign donors than they care about doing what's best for the people whose money they are spending.
To surrender control of your tax dollars to a bureaucratic, centralized government is to surrender your freedom of choice. It's ironic (though entirely non-surprising), that it's overwhelmingly "progressive" Democrats - the self-professed defenders of "choice" - who advocate for such a tyrannical system of government funding.
No thanks.
I'll take the New Hampshire way any damn day of the week, and do everything in my power to keep it intact.
Live free or die, baby.
Yea but you have to live up in New Hampshire....
Thats the problem of having to live in New Hampshire I guess.
Thats the whole problem with this whole discussion. Its still not bad enough down here for people to want to move their entire family an hour away to save how much exactly on taxes?
I mean, how about Maine? Its even cheaper to live there. Hell, you can find a great house in New Brunswick for 90K! Too much? In Newfoundland you can great a great place for 50K. Hell, they will pay you to live in Greenland if you wanted to!
Untill you see the same jobs in NH paying 2x as much as you do in MA, you won't see any great migration of people from MA up to NH.
How many NH residents already pay income tax to the state of MA?
And I actually don't really notice my income tax or sales tax down here in MA as much as I notice my real estate tax. That probably has more to do with the way these taxes are paid, but these dam federal taxes are the ones that should be boggling everyones mind, not the state or real estate taxes.
Depends where in MA
I paid 786.78 in property taxes in the past year.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
forget cali. I can almost
forget cali. I can almost guarantee they will not be looking so good come next year when all government services are cut and taxes are increased. If you are looking for the best business enviroment look no more than North Carolina.
NC
I have a couple friends who really like NC, in the Raleigh-Durham area. They work at great high-tech companies, and somehow they could afford to buy nice cars and McMansions with yards there, in their 20s.
Boston is really leaving money on the table with high-tech. Some of us *want* to live and work in Cambridge/Boston, not in Waltham, nor move to the Bay Area, NYC, or our own McMansion in RTP.
RTP
I think living in RTP would drive me insane ... or rather the driving would drive me insane. Drivetime sprawlzone nightmare with no central core!
I have considered it, too. Where else would I have heard that Cary, NC is really an acronym for "Corral Area for Relocated Yankees".
MBTA
I think most people would rather cruise RTP suburban sprawl in their luxury sedan than be stuck on (or waiting for) an MBTA cattle-car.
Having had to take the Green Line a lot recently, I'm beginning wonder whether tracks jumpers are registering dissatisfaction not just with life, but with the MBTA in particular.
It'll be a hoot when this
It'll be a hoot when this gets to SCOTUS.
Good!
Good. They are really grasping for anything in MA these days. I still think a fat casino should be built right on the MA/NH border as well, but adding slots to the tracks that are already in place is a good start.
Who's grasping? There's
Who's grasping?
There's already precedent with online purchases that have physical locations in state.
Not Exactly
If you buy things on line, and get them delivered to a MA address, these things are taxed.
If you bought something at Pheasant Lane Mall at a store that also exists in MA, and brought it to Aunt Edna in Nashua for her birthday, MA says they have a right to tax it because YOU live in MA and that store has a store in MA.
Something about "restraint of interstate trade" there? Well, judges are going to have to decide that because MA even thinks it gets to tax some of the stuff I bought for my kids in Oregon, if you look at how they define these things. Heck, MA thinks it should get to tax stuff my dad sends to me from Oregon!
Walla Walla
When I lived in Walla Walla (6 miles from Oregon border, for those of you who aren't SwirlyGrrl), the businesses were all very familiar with people whose address is in Oregon, where there's no sales tax. They had a log for people to sign stating they'd showed an Oregon ID. At many of the stores, if you went in with a group of people, they'd even ask "does any one of you have an Oregon license?" Most out-of-state students would show their ID when buying taxable stuff too, because Washington has no income tax, thus has sales tax of 8-10% depending what locale. Most businesses were happy to charge you your state's sales tax and then send all the tax to the correct state at the end of the quarter.
And needless to say, yeah, I made most of my major purchases and car repairs and such in Oregon. Again, Washington doesn't have an income tax, so there was no tax form on which I could declare that I owed Washington money for these things. Not sure if I technically should have been sending Washington a payment every quarter.
I'm pretty sure Massachusetts doesn't allow businesses to sell NH residents items tax-free, because 1) Massachusetts has a policy where if it ain't illegal, it's mandatory, and 2) I've been shopping in MA with many a New Hampshireite, and I've worked near the NH border, and never witnessed the "which state are you from?" at the checkout as is frequent on the OR/WA border.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
Wrong term
I used the wrong term but it seems like MA is more than happy to find new tax increases rather than cuts. Actually, it seems as though that's how they are doing it everywhere but the problem seems acute in MA.