Friday, April 08, 2011

AB 153 Internet Sales Tax/ Economic Impact Report for Superstores SB496/ Volunteers In Medicine

It has just been brought to my attention that AB 153[Skinner] which would require out of state Internet companies like Amazon and Overstocks to collect sales tax at the point of purchase has been taken out of suspense and will be coming before the Assembly Appropriations committee.

This was heard a while back and the vote was 5 to 2 but did not have a majority and went into suspense. This is a very important bill for brick and mortar stores in California and for all small businesses in California because of the record keeping involved in tracking your current purchases.

This week SB 496[Vargas] was heard in the Senate Government & Finance Committee and Small Business California was the lead in testimony support of the bill . This would require on Superstores of 90000 square feet and who’s sales are over 10% of nontaxable goods to do an economic impact report before receiving their permit. The local government jurisdiction would chose the party doing the economic impact report. The bill passed 6 to 3.

Small Business California was responsible for this latter requirement and strongly supports this bill. It will now go to Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.

You all know of my involvement with Volunteers in Medicine and Clinic by the Bay a VIM clinic in San Francisco. VIM takes retired doctors, nurses and lay volunteers who provide free health services to the working uninsured. We do not take any government money.

VIM recently did a survey of their 84 clinics around the country and while certainly not scientific came up with the following information. 67% of the clinics responded.
Obviously we did some extrapolation not having all clinics respond but we came up with the following numbers.

VIM clinics provided health care services to 96,142 friends and neighbors[ patients] with 350,108 patient visits.

The average cost of a patient visits was $76 and per patient $274
!0785 individuals volunteered their time.4852 were medical volunteers and 5933 were non medical.

The 96,142 patients served represents an 18% increase from 2009.

In these difficult times there are a lot of good things happening in our country and I think VIM is just one example.


Scott Hauge
President
Small Business California
2311 Taraval Street
San Francisco, CA 94116
shauge@cal-insure.com
415-680-2188

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One reason Internet shoppers have been seeking out purchasing or transacting business vis a vis online is to help themselves avoid the OVER taxation both fed and state that is simply burdening everyone. Guess I would be in favor to go with this if California law makers also agreed to lower all taxes including corporate, sales, and many other already too-high taxes. Consider flat tax theory. Lower taxes will stimulate the economy and by the way, instead of thinking about how to generate MORE tax revenue, how about thinking about making Cost Cuts like governement worker pension reform and reducing the size of the state government? Fiscal responsibility for once could make people like myself more open to something like this. Scott in Mission Viejo