LF: Justice Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch levy internet taxes

WASHINGTON (AP) -- States will be able to force more people to pay sales tax when they make online purchases under a Supreme Court decision Thursday that will leave shoppers with lighter wallets but is a big financial win for states.

Consumers can expect to see sales tax charged on more online purchases — likely over the next year and potentially before the Christmas shopping season — as states and retailers react to the court's decision, said one attorney involved in the case.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 opinion Thursday overruled a pair of decades-old decisions that states said cost them billions of dollars in lost revenue annually. The decisions made it more difficult for states to collect sales tax on certain online purchases, and more than 40 states had asked the high court for action. Five states don't charge sales tax.

The cases the court overturned said that if a business was shipping a customer's purchase to a state where the business didn't have a physical presence such as a warehouse or office, the business didn't have to collect sales tax for the state. Customers were generally responsible for paying the sales tax to the state themselves if they weren't charged it, but most didn't realize they owed it and few paid.

"Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States," he wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Kennedy wrote that the rule "limited States' ability to seek long-term prosperity and has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field."

The ruling is a victory for big chains with a presence in many states, since they usually collect sales tax on online purchases already. Now, rivals will be charging sales tax where they hadn't before.

Big chains have been collecting sales tax nationwide because they typically have physical stores in whatever state a purchase is being shipped to. Amazon.com, with its network of warehouses, also collects sales tax in every state that charges it, though third-party sellers who use the site don't have to.

Until now, many sellers that have a physical presence in only a single state or a few states have been able to avoid charging sales taxes when they ship to addresses outside those states. Online sellers that haven't been charging sales tax on goods shipped to every state range from jewelry website Blue Nile to pet products site Chewy.com to clothing retailer L.L. Bean.

Sellers that use eBay and Etsy, which provide platforms for smaller sellers, also haven't been collecting sales tax nationwide.

Under the ruling Thursday, states can pass laws requiring out-of-state sellers to collect the state's sales tax from customers and send it to the state. More than a dozen states have already adopted laws like that ahead of the court's decision, according to state tax policy expert Joseph Crosby.

Retail trade groups praised the ruling, saying it levels the playing field for local and online businesses. The losers, said retail analyst Neil Saunders, are online-only retailers, especially smaller ones. Those retailers may face headaches complying with various state sales tax laws, though there are software options to help. That software, too, can be an added cost. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council advocacy group said in a statement, "Small businesses and internet entrepreneurs are not well served at all by this decision."

Chief Justice John Roberts and three of his colleagues would have kept the court's previous decisions in place.

"E-commerce has grown into a significant and vibrant part of our national economy against the backdrop of established rules, including the physical-presence rule. Any alteration to those rules with the potential to disrupt the development of such a critical segment of the economy should be undertaken by Congress," Roberts wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. The lineup of justices on each side of the case was unusual, with Roberts joining three more liberal justices and Ginsburg joining her more conservative colleagues.

The case the court ruled on involved a 2016 law passed by South Dakota, which said it was losing out on an estimated $50 million a year in sales tax not collected by out-of-state sellers. Lawmakers in the state, which has no income tax, passed a law designed to directly challenge the physical presence rule. The law requires out-of-state sellers who do more than $100,000 of business in the state or more than 200 transactions annually with state residents to collect sales tax and send it to the state.

South Dakota wanted out-of-state retailers to begin collecting the tax and sued several of them: Overstock.com, electronics retailer Newegg and home goods company Wayfair. After the Supreme Court's decision was announced, shares in Wayfair and Overstock both fell. Shares in large chains with more stores traded higher.

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard called Thursday's decision a "Great Day for South Dakota," though the high court stopped short of greenlighting the state's law. While the Supreme Court spoke approvingly of the law, it sent it back to South Dakota's highest court to be revisited in light of the court's decision.

The Trump administration had urged the justices to side with South Dakota. On Twitter, President Donald Trump called the decision a "Big victory for fairness and for our country." He also called it a "Great victory for consumers and retailers," though consumers will ultimately be paying more and businesses weren't uniformly cheering the decision.

The case is South Dakota v. Wayfair, 17-494.

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Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

Internet retailers forced into servitude, as tax revenuers for State governments. It's slavery, and you're going to pay for it in taxes.

Thank President Trump's wonderful SCOTUS Justice Gorsuch, and the other tyrants in black robes.

We live in a republic, and in all but four states, the people have voted in legislatures and governors who have passed and signed sales taxes of some sort into law. The sales tax has been voluntarily imposed on the society by itself through the democratic process.

To have a sales tax on SOME businesses - the brick and mortar traditional kind that have heavy infrastructure cost - but to allow another kind of business that sells the same product - Internet companies - to NOT have a sales tax is massively unfair. It is an unwarranted advantage given to the Internet companies.

It is absolutely right and just that purchases of goods and services on the Internet be subject to EXACTLY the same sales taxation as every other transaction in a given state. It is unreasonable for there to be an exception, "because...Internet", and it's a terrifically unfair disadvantage to the brick-and-mortar operations that actually employ people and pay property taxes, etc.

Taxes in a republic are not slavery. They are voted upon by the people, and upheld in election after election. The people are not stupid and are not children. Would it be great to have no taxes? Sure. As long as the country could survive with no police, no army, no roads and no sewers everything would go swimmingly.

But that's a fantasy - all of those things are necessary - and every reasonable adult and most reasonable children know that. So therefore taxes are absolutely necessary. And because they are voted on by the people through the democratic process, they are not theft. It's an abuse of language and of reason to call them theft.

Nobody wants to pay taxes. Nobody wants to have to shit either. Some things are so and there's no use whining about them. Taxation without representation is tyranny, but taxation WITH representation is necessary.

Don't want to pay ANY taxes? Easy. The taiga is a vast swathe of forest that stretches around the world from Canada through Siberia. It is mostly a trackless wilderness with very little human habitation, and what habitation there is is all clusters of people in cities and villages. Any man who wants to be completely free of government can easily drive up to Canada, or fly off to Russia, walk off into the pine forest and never come back. He can walk to a place where there is not another human being for 100 square miles. He will not be subject to a single human law there. No taxes. No regulations at all. Completely and utterly free of all law, except of course the law of nature - which will kill him very quickly.

So, that's the tradeoff: pay taxes and have the sort of massive infrastructure that only the state can provide - and live into your seventies or eighties, and not have to bury half of your children before they reach the age of seven. Or you can call taxation to pay for the life- sustaining infrastructure "theft" and live without the infrastructure...for about a fifth of the lifespan, and bury lots of children.

We vote every year, and the vast majority of people in every country where people vote, vote for taxes, because the alternative is a short and miserable life.

Anybody who disagrees can always go off and live in the taiga. Total freedom of all human law is always available to any North American or European - walk right off the edge of the world into the taiga. It is likewise available to every South American and African: walk off into the jungle.

What is the justification for the state sales tax? By that I mean what is the seller getting in return for the tax he paid to the state? Police and fire services? Utilities? Roads?

Without a physical presence in the state, the seller gets none of these benefits. So how is Internet taxation right and just and fair to those sellers?

I seem to recall we had a national revolution that centered around "taxation without representation".

The seller is simply collecting the tax from the consumer and remitting it to the state.

It is my understanding that the tax will be based on the local sales tax rate of the consumer. Therefore the consumer is actually paying the tax, and receiving the benefits.

What if Illinois wanted to collect a state sales tax on all Internet orders shipped to, say, Florida? Why not? Hey, they certainly need need the revenue. And it's not fair that they're on the brink of bankruptcy and Florida is not.

There is no justification for the sales tax. None. And I argue that an arbitrary tax like this interferes with interstate commerce and penalizes consumers who are getting nothing for their tax dollars.

For instance, in Ohio we have a "use tax" - Ohioans are "required" to report their internet purchases and pay the "use tax" on these purchases.

This ruling would allow states to demand taxes be collected by online sellers on sales made to consumers in their state.

High Court: Online shoppers can be forced to pay sales tax