Following the (online) money.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: RUNDLES wrap up

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME UNTIL THE government got around to forcing Internet merchants to collect and distribute sales tax to states and smaller jurisdictions for online purchases--and even if the Tea Partiers in the U.S. House won't go along with what the Senate did last month with the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013, it is, once again, only a matter of time.

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Too much money is at stake some say as much as $23 billion per year and rising and Republican and Democratic governors alike not to mention mayors, county commissioners, transit authorities, etc.) generally drop political expediency when there is so much free money so tantalizingly close at band. They don't even have to go to die voters! Dull. No brainer.

Technically speaking, we Coloradans who buy stuff online from out-of-state vendors (or, as they say, vendors with no "nexus" and don't pay the state sales tax of 2.9 percent (called a "use tax" in our state if reported later than the actual transaction), are scofflaws. It's a big, big club Huge. I buy stuff online and skip the tax reporting, but I don't go to the Internet to save on sales tax. 1 go there because I can find stuff I can't find around here.

I do, however, believe that imposing the burden of collecting sales tax on Internet merchants is the fair way to go, but I object to the proposed new law exempting online merchants who do less than $1 million in annual sales from the requirement.

I mean, c'mon. The idea behind the less-than-$1 million exemption and some, like eBay, believe it should be less than $10 million is that it will be a too-expensive burden on small business to discover all the necessary tax reporting and remittance information required to comply with the law. I don't buy that argument. Heck, if my telephone's GPS can direct me to Bob's House of Pies in Joplin, Mo., through a detour set up last week by the local road department, then digitizing the nation's patchwork quilt of sales tax jurisdictions would be a piece of cake. As the saying goes, there's an app for that. Or soon will be. I'm pretty sure that once Congress got serious about mandating sales tax collections and payment for Internet merchants that a kid at Google, over lunch, wrote the program for the app and...