Taxing Tradeoff

This morning's Sun editorial was unsurprising in tone:

Many online retailers continue to enjoy an unfair advantage over brick-and-mortar merchants across the country, and that will persist until Congress takes much-needed action and makes mandatory the payment of state sales taxes on Internet (and catalog) purchases.

Leave it to the Sun to call for an expansion of federal government power in order to fulfil their taxation desires. However, there are tradeoffs to making purchase online. When buying online, you take the risk of not receiving the proper product, or not liking the product since you were not afforded an opportunity to try out the product in the store. In the case of big ticket items, such as computers, you still have to wait a week to ten days in order to receive your merchandies. It's a tradeoff; if you need the goods you are purchasing now, buy them at the store. If you want to save five percent on the sales tax and have the time to wait, order it now.

Instead of bemoaning the alledged inequality of it all, maybe the Sun would be better off pushing for lower sales taxes on brick-and-mortar store sales.