I think a more general "fix" for this would be to just ditch state sales taxes and go for a more general % of income state tax.

Yes it means I'd get hit for more money tax wise, but would eliminate the utter and sheer horror that is state and local sales tax code.

That or something more like Britains tax code, though collect for the state the person is in for a flat % and pass that along. But really I think this whole debate sidesteps the real issue our local/federal government has with local vs nonlocal sales tax.

Not paying the tax is illegal, but it's a state crime, not a Federal crime. Trying to flaunt Federal tax law can be very, very risky (just ask Al Capone), but it isn't as big a risk to flaunt state tax laws. That doesn't make it right or risk free, but you won't be looking at Federal prison time because you didn't pay your state's use tax on your most recent Amazon purchase.

The amounts in question, though, are usually pretty low. Most people don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on internet purchases, so that lowers the incentive of the state tax agencies to pursue these transgressions with their limited resources. (Remember, they don't have easy access to your out-of-state spending records, so they really don't know whether you've spent $5.00 or $500,000.00 online.)

Also, there's the whole burden of proof issue involved here. You want to charge me with a crime? You need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I committed that crime. In practice, that means that you'll be flying in a record keeper from Amazon - and putting her up in a hotel - to testify at trial. Maybe someone from Paypal or my credit card company, too. (As a defense attorney, there's no way I'm going to stipulate to that information.) That makes prosecuting smaller violations more costly than it's worth.

(For the record, I declare and pay my state's use tax every year on my tax form; I put my internet purchase receipts in a particular email folder to make calculating my costs super easy. Not paying the miniscule tax simply isn't worth the potential hassle to me; lawsuits are a major pain in the rear whether you win or lose, especially when the charges are criminal.)

They don't owe anything, the Supreme Court has ruled that you don't have to collect sales tax unless you have a presence in the state (a la the Commerce Clause of the Constitution). It isn't tax evasion, pure and simple.

Congress has the sole authority to tax and regulate interstate commerce, and if they choose to do so via this act, that is fine and dandy but that is a totally different issue.

You've got too many pronouns without antecedents in your post. The merchants are not liable to collect sales tax, but customers may be liable to pay it under their state law. This is called a use tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax

Exact details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction... and in fact that's the problem this bill is intended to address. A federal framework is necessary to avoid the problem of being required to track an arbitrary number of non-Federal frameworks.

The purchaser has always been responsible for the sales tax. However, in America, almost all taxing jurisdictions implement a withholding charge on the merchant, so that the merchant collects the sales tax owed by the purchaser on the purchaser's behalf.

Quill v. North Dakota, the SCOTUS case to which you refer, was about a sale-order catalog's obligation to withhold the sales tax for purchases by out-of-state state customers (in the case, customers in North Dakota). SCOTUS ruled that North Dakota did not have the jurisdiction to impose a withholding obligation on Quill because it did not do sufficient business in the state to have a "presence". However, after the case in various speeches, several of the deciding justices noted that if Quill had had a greater volume of business (on the order of an in-state retailer), the outcome would probably have been different.