No way I hope not! 2012 baby! Huckabee OR maybe Trump... hahaha!

Well apparently you missed your chance. He was there. :P

-Omi

Armothe was out here? it wasn't listed that BrickForge was one of the vendors on the site.

Yeah I noticed he mentioned it on his twitter when I said that. He may have just been an attendee.

-Omi

I was not personally at Bricks by the Bay, but BF was selling items there

As far as the taxes go - most states have a sales tax (I know TX doesn't). Since we are located in Ohio, we have to collect Sales Tax for each transaction being shipped to Ohio. Same as if someone bought a $6.99 LEGO set from the Columbus LEGO store at Easton Mall. No big deal, really, it's just one form.

When vending at shows in other states we apply for a vendors license for that state and then we do have to pay the cumulative Sales Tax (file for that year). A bit bigger of a deal but we can manage.

Where we start feeling a crunch is when a bunch of states decide that their citizens should be paying Sales tax on online purchases made from their home computer - even though the business is in another state. Up until now there has been no sales tax collected for online purchases (other than the state the business resides in). If we have to start collecting Sales Tax for each and every state that means 1) the prices will go up and 2) BF will have to spend more resources to file more paperwork with the IRS.

The easy thing to do is move operations to some place tropical where we wouldn't have to deal with all this nonsense. And people wonder why the jobs are leaving the United States.....

-A

Well like I said from what I can understand only states where BF has a point of sales would states be able to collect taxs, like business, distribution centers and conventions, but then there is the use tax situation but it would not affect BF since it is up to the individual buyer in states where Use tax is collected to file the proper paperwork and taxs, last year my Use tax wasn't too bad, so ended up only having to pay a few dollars, but thats also cause my deductibles covered most of it.

Ah I see now, Tom was selling them. :P

-Omi

"The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that states cannot compel mail order retailers to collect sales taxes unless they have a "physical presence" in the state, such as a store."
Just in case anyone was wondering. You probably won't be affected. As noted in the article, a "Use Tax" is very hard to collect and is relatively impractical. The fact we as a nation are relatively split up and each state has it's own government is really what is preventing us from having any sort of "Use Tax": Businesses would essentially have to file paper work for every state and it could possibly kill the the business if it's too small or possibly cause inflation to the point where spending would slow to a stop. [Without flow of money, economy essentially goes kaput.] The tax itself would have to be government imposed and not state imposed. --Essentially it would be better for the state to just impose some other sort of tax.

A VAT tax would most likely not pass in the US, we have Republicans in the house right now and the tax itself would not sit well with the American people. Passing any sort of VAT tax now would probably ruin Obama's chances of being re-elected. Don't forget guys, Presidents aren't dumb. They do have people checking public opinion polls constantly.

Also, to be honest, the way it looks now; Obama is going to be president for another 4 years; especially if Trump runs as a third party (probably the only way he'd be able to run) or if the Tea Party puts up a candidate even.


@Armorthe:
:P I'm pretty sure leaving the country to do business would give you just as much paper work with taxes. Jobs are leaving the US because people outside of the US are willing to work for less than what people in the US are willing to work.

Tell that too Amazon who is fighting against states who are now demanding taxs for sales thru them, the part about the store has just now become very hazy indeed to extend to any sales presence and even distribution points.

The thing about Amazon is that they probably have multiple store houses or business locations. If Amazon had stayed in one state they wouldn't have a problem. The fact they also were an online retailer for multiple physical stores at one time doesn't help that fact.