Dale Bumpers: “I come today to introduce a bill dealing with the mail-order catalog business. This issue has become almost an obsession…”

“I come today to introduce a bill dealing with the mail-order catalog business. This issue has become almost an obsession with me over the past 2 years, and one of the reasons for that obsession is that, before I became Governor of Arkansas, I was a hardware, furniture, and appliance dealer, practicing law in a small town, raising cattle, doing anything to put bread on the table. And the biggest competitor I had was the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Sears, Roebuck was tough competition for me because they were big, had a much bigger variety of goods, and were reasonably cheap by comparative standards. But while Sears, Roebuck was tough competition, it was also fair competition. They bore the same burdens of doing business that I did. One of those burdens was collecting sales taxes. Because Sears, Roebuck had stores in every State in the Nation, they had to collect sales taxes on everything they sold through their catalog operation, just like I had to collect sales taxes on everything I sold in my hardware store. The reason Sears, Roebuck had to collect those taxes was that, under the law, if you have a physical presence in any State, you must collect sales tax on goods shipped into that State, even if the goods are sold through a catalog. Over the past few years, however, an entirely new situation has been developing in the competition between Main Street retailers and catalog operations. And that situation is not one of fair competition.”