Amazon Wars

States Must Tax Booming Online Retail

Battles with online retailers, particularly Amazon.com, are raging from New York to North Carolina, Oklahoma to Colorado and Texas to, now, California. This is good news for lawyers but no one else. How has it come to this? How have so many states ended up in costly confrontations with popular retailers?

Part of the answer is that states are growing desperate. It’s bad enough that a soft economy has shrunk government revenues and forced draconian cuts in services. What’s particularly maddening is that developments in technology, in tandem with obsolete federal …