Floored by the Marketplace Fairness Act
By Justin Krauss, GarageFlooringLLC.com
Several years ago I overcame a series of difficult obstacles and started Garage Flooring LLC up in my garage. At the time, things were so tight financially that I personally filled out the paperwork and put the filing fee on a credit card. I thought getting started would be the hardest battle for a small business owner. Boy was I wrong!
The Marketplace Fairness Act threatens to destroy eCommerce as we know it. I am not talking about Big online mega-retailers. Those companies actually support this bill because it gives them an unfair advantage and will put small businesses out of business. I'm talking about small online businesses like mine. While proponents of this bill want you to believe all internet companies are run by rich CEOs in Silicone Valley, most of us are anything but. My wife and I have a blended family of 8, we live in a rented 2500 sq. ft home in a modest neighborhood in Grand Junction, CO. Between the two of us we have over 300,000 miles on vehicles that span over 20 years. We invest back into the company and into good people. We provide good benefits and have employees in positions ranging from customer service to programming. We have an office in Grand Junction, CO and we pay use tax, personal property tax, employment taxes, income taxes, workers compensation and countless other costs and fees. And we collect sales tax on sales in Colorado just like every other small business here. We believe that taxes are the price we pay to live in the greatest nation on earth. BUT, our company, and many like us simply cannot afford the massive and often misrepresented costs of becoming a tax-collector of 46 states and over 9,600 jurisdictions. If you are a small business owner, traditional or online, you are our friends and counter-parts in a war that has been waged against us by mega-retailers like Walmart and Home Depot and an over-reaching government.
Our web address happens to be .com, but we are a small business and small business is the backbone of this nation. We will not stand idly by while constitution, the free market, our family and the families of our employees are put at risk by another big government anti-business regulation