As Congresswoman Kristi Noem sits mostly idle in her job—not on House Ag to toot about the Farm Bill, sidelined by an Executive Branch that illegally goes to war without seeking Congressional approval—Attorney General Marty Jackley uses his job to suck up media air with his impending all-star spectacular appearance before the Supreme Court to allow South Dakota to collect sales tax from businesses not in South Dakota.
As we have come to expect from Republicans, A.G. Jackley’s comments about S.D. v. Wayfair et al. are rich with political contradiction:
Jackley said, in his travels, he’s found that local retailers are in a bind.
“You’re seeing, time and time again, your constituents come to you and saying, ‘Main Street’s hurting for a variety of reasons,” Jackley said. “’One of the big reasons is we have a disadvantage. Internet retail is ahead of us 6 ½ percent (in reference to state sales tax) right out of the gate’” [Rob Nielsen, “Jackley Ready for Supreme Court Battle on Internet Tax,” Yankton Press & Dakotan, 2018.04.13].
Funny: another reason that Main Street’s hurting is that we tax food while Minnesota and Iowa don’t, putting grocers in North Sioux City and other near-border towns at a significant competitive disadvantage. Yet Jackley spends all of his tax energy on a Supreme Court gamble and ignores the sure-fire Main Street booster of repealing the food tax.
“As we continue to have a disadvantage on main street, it’s costing us jobs,” he said. “When those jobs are lost, it’s affecting peoples’ healthcare, communities and the state’s revenue” [Nielsen, 2018.04.13].
Funny: Louisiana just joined the list of states providing empirical evidence that expanding Medicaid provides a sure-fire boost to Main Street by creating jobs and increasing economic activity. Yet Jackley, who lost the argument before the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act and won nothing but the ability to keep South Dakota out of the Medicaid expansion, rejects the economic opportunity offered by Medicaid expansion and hoots instead about Medicaid fraud.
“I believe in our argument,” he said. “I believe that we need to do this for South Dakota and for Main Street. Whether I’m delivering it (to the press), to a moot court, I’ve delivered it in front of some former solicitors general — I just believe in the argument. I think it’s right. … More than anything, that’s what makes this argument easy” [Nielsen, 2018.04.13].
Funny: one of Jackley’s ads touts his defense of states’ rights. Yet empowering one state to reach across its borders and collect tax from residents of another state muddies the concept of states’ rights. Opponents of online sales taxes have said that forcing New Hampshire businesses to collect sales tax for South Dakota “tramples on states’ rights.” It is thus hard to tell which argument Jackley deems more right: the right of states to make law for themselves or the right of states to impose their laws on folks in other states.
There are a lot of right arguments we can easily make that Jackley ignores. But not everything in Jackley’s interview is funny for its contradictions. One statement is funny just for its whack at his primary opponent:
Jackley said the case has support from all across South Dakota.
“Other than from our congress-person, this has been a united South Dakota front,” he said. “This has been almost every legislator, the governor, the attorney general, South Dakota retailers. The South Dakota Farm Bureau wrote a very, very strong brief. It was the national organization and the South Dakota one — and it talked about what this does to agriculture and the importance of main streets to agriculture” [Nielsen, 2018.04.13].
Jackley’s criticism of Noem isn’t quite accurate: Noem appears to support allowing states to collect sales tax from remote online sellers, but she failed to get House leaders or the White House to support her bill on the subject, and Jackley has enjoyed painting Noem as a failure on this subject. Perhaps Jackley is taking Yoda’s “Do or do not; there is no try” position: if Noem can’t turn her support into real, enacted legislation, then it’s not real support.
The picture of unusual taxonomy is strangely appropriate for this article.
What are the odds Jackley becomes Gosuck’s lapdog for the duration?
Your argument is very well done, while Jackley’s certainly is not. The image is perfectly appropriate, but kinda creepy. Eeuuwwwww.
The way to fix the internet sales tax issue, if it needs fixing, is for Congress to outlaw all internet sales taxes other than a uniform federal internet sales tax rate, collect the tax and divide it among the states according to a formula based upon population.
Cory, do you ever delete off topic comments, especially those that aren’t even tangentially related to the topic at hand?
[Nick, yes, sometimes I do, though I like to count on my commenters to police themselves and discuss in good faith. I can always count on you for that. Thank you, Nick. —CAH]
[…] I wonder what it will cost me for the computer software etc I will need as an upstart business selling my goods over the internet to others out-of-state if the Supremes rule in SD’s favor? A bunch I’ll bet, to cover all the tax jurisdictions down to local level in the US. Somewhere I read over 10,000 tax entities. This is simply adding to cost of business in South Dakota by our reliance on sales tax and property only. We abhor income tax for some unknown reason, yet ALL tax -even unfair ones on food- are paid for from income! Yet those with the less of INCOME pay way higher percentage of TAX than those with the most!
Jake,
Are you reporting your income in the States you sell to?
Jake,
If you are and you are not committing tax fraud than your software should already be able to track sales tax. If not, then it’s time for you to buy Quickbooks. It’s only $200 when not on sale.
I am against this lawsuit based on the Constitution.
Why should people with lower income pay less in tax?
Hi, Rohr. You’re great as usual.
[…]
Porter, one of my very favorite comic strips is Zippy by Bill Griffith. Zippy the Pinhead spins non sequitur after non sequitur. Most of the various comments on various threads by Jason parallel Zippy non sequiturs. Unfortunately, Jason’s non sequiturs lack the satire, bite and humor of Zippy’s non sequiturs.
“Why should people with lower income pay less in tax?”
Jason almost provokes a good distraction here… but this post doesn’t touch on the regressive/progressive taxation argument. Now I’ll cut Jason some slack here: sometimes I get so embroiled in ongoing arguments that I skim through the comment section and forget which post and which argument I’m responding to. Jason, for the discussion of why progressive tax rates are superior to regressive systems, see Senator Thune’s defense of progressivity, something similar from a Meade County commissioner, my quick blip last week on KSOO, and the general principle that we often discuss here that taking 7% of a poor man’s income has a much larger impact on his overall utility and quality of life than taking 7% of a rich man’s income…
…none of which gets Marty Jackley out of the contradiction jams identified in this article:
Come on, Jason: this is clearly a debatable issue. Why not engage on the article presented instead of trying to distract us from Jackley’s contradictions (on which you hint at agreeing with us in your unfleshed-out comment about opposition on Constitutional grounds. States’ rights? what?)?
Cat got your tongue, Jason? You just can’t debate the issue on it’s merits can you?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-taxes-preview/south-dakota-e-commerce-sale-tax-fight-reaches-u-s-supreme-court-idUSKBN1HM0G1
Never saw Jackley’s named mentioned once.
Jackley doesn’t need national press from the lawsuit right now; he’s playing to the home primary crowd.
BCB … I wrote a complaint to the DenverPost when they dropped Zippy the Pinhead, a few years ago. Loved that daily dose much more than anyone here seems to love Jason’s daily. He’s as misleading and distracting as the late great Free Press poster, Troy Jones. lol
(Porter, I was just thinking about Troy vs. Jason. Troy was far superior: I got much less of a sense from him that he was arguing just for the sake of argument and character assassination. Troy’s comments were more regularly on point and even instructive.)
Troy is sneaky.
As a pre-teen at the state fair I’d spend most of the day parked in front of the barkers. Sales people who would promise to give away something in order to draw a crowd to listen to their pitch. They fascinated me. I knew they were floating a con and the task was to figure out how. Most of what they said was true and insightful, which built trust. But, there was always a word that just didn’t fit in completely and that’s where the con was. It was a misdirection and a misrepresentation. True but not supporting the assertion. It was paralogizing.
To me, that’s what a heated discussion with Troy is similar to. You know he’s conning you but you need to think, to figure out how.
Here’s an example of using deceptive misdirection. Sean Hannity got busted today for not disclosing that he was a client of Mikey Cohen during the recent sponsor boycotts of his show. Hannity’s excuse is that he never spoke to Cohen about a third party person. He only got advice so he wasn’t a true client and disclosure wasn’t warranted. The con is the word person. Hannity didn’t seek retaliation against a person, he sought retaliation against a corporation or several. Person or even corporations, he was still a client and he’s trying to misdirect by using the word person. It’s just a deceptive con job. That’s what Troy does.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-taxes/supreme-court-struggles-with-e-commerce-sales-tax-case-idUSKBN1HO0I0?il=0
Not sure how this will go. OTOH, Gosuck sided with Libs to block potus from kicking all immigrants with felonies out of the country.