Taxpayers foot the bill for study supporting new Internet sales taxes
Critics of the Marketplace Fairness Act immediately called foul on the study. Andrew Moylan of the R Street Institute quickly pointed out in an article responding to the study that that it was incredibly biased and written by authors who have already written articles favoring the MFA in the past, all on the taxpayer’s dime. “In service of the PR campaign for President Obama’s and Senator Dick Durbin’s favorite Internet sales tax law, the SBA decided to fork over $80,000 of taxpayer money to…(drumroll please)…the very people who have been writing studies in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA)! What a coincidence!”
Moylan also contends that the actual information contained in the study was not of any real importance, covering no new ground. “In fact, the most important passage essentially concedes that having a higher small seller exception in the bill ‘does not add measurably to the covered share of total online retail,’ wrote Moylan. “In other words, protecting a larger number of businesses from the onerous compliance obligations of MFA wouldn’t appreciably reduce revenues.”
