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Comment by phirephly | Hacker News Reader

Damn. There goes my $300-$400 a month passive income... And I already report my use-tax to begin with. Guess it's time to start calling up friends out-of-state for their mailing address.

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And CA won't be collecting income tax on your $300-400 per month (since Amazon has canceled affiliates in CA), so their tax income is actually less.

And if I have to start filing tax returns with every state and county my small business happens to do business with (~$1000 / year business), I'll probably shut that down entirely for not being worth the bother as well.

Almost sounds inspired by crazy European Union VAT laws! American companies are technically required to register to collect EU VAT if their sales to any EU territory are over a certain amount. Thankfully, most smaller ones don't.

The level above which you have to register to collect the VAT is there precisely to protect the smaller companies which make a few small sales to the EU. If you are making enough sales to be over the threshold you should be able to afford to abide by the law.

Except it's a bizarre law because those US companies are not necessarily in the EU themselves. It'd be like California demanding a business in Poland should charge local California sales taxes for any exports to that state.

You can also sign up for an account with a mail service like EarthClassMail for a small amount per month.

What do you run?

A few small sites, but most of my Amazon earnings actually just come from one post: http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/2011/06/so-you-want-to-b...

The rest of the site pulls in about $20/mo in Adsense, which is still pretty nice, but them added together is much more interesting.

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