Political Quotes

“I want to thank the Senator from Illinois for his excellent explanation. I have been joining him and watching him do that for several years. It would be nice to get this finished. There are a few things we may not have mentioned that are sometimes raised when people ask me about marketplace fairness. One of them is from small towns. They say: We have to go on the Internet because there is not enough selection in our town and we can get things we cannot buy in town and some of the things we can get at a lower price by going out of town. I always ask them, when they are figuring that lower price, are they figuring it without sales tax or with sales tax, because it is not truly a lower price if what you are doing is just cheating your local merchant out of the right to collect the sales tax--which he does not get paid for anyway--and submitting it, when the out-of-State retailer does not have to do that. As to the revenue that companies are voluntarily collecting now--and there are a number of them that recognize it is difficult for everybody to keep track of their purchases, so they voluntarily collect it--the question I have had is, Does that money they voluntarily collect go back to the States? Yes, it absolutely does, and it will work that way under the bill as well. It is not money that you are just sending to wherever you ordered it from. You are sending it to where it was ordered from, and then they are sending it back to States.…”