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Kansas: onerous sales tax law

Neil Diamond and Deep Purple

This is a bit arcane, especially if you’re not in the United States. On October 1, “Texas and Kansas will be the latest states to tax remote sales – think online/mail order purchases – “leaving only two holdouts (Florida and Missouri) among the 45 states with sales tax.”

A business “must have nexus — a connection with a state — for the state to require the business to collect and remit sales tax.” It used to be that “sales tax nexus was based solely on physical presence: States couldn’t require an out-of-state seller with no physical presence in the state (remote seller) to collect and remit sales tax.”

Got that?

The Supreme Court’s 2018 “ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. enables states to tax remote sales… Wayfair authorizes states to require remote sellers in one state to collect and remit sales tax” based on their sales volume or the number of transactions in another state, what they call “economic nexus.”

OK.

Up until now, every state has had a minimum dollar amount or number of transactions before a business, say in New York, had to collect sales tax from Connecticut residents. New York business then sends that sales tax money to Connecticut, but only if that New York business had 200 transactions AND $100,000 in sales in Connecticut.

This generally exempted tiny businesses, such as most folks with an Etsy account.

“Many retailers are hoping Kansas will enact a small seller exception because as of this writing, it doesn’t have one.” This would be onerous for someone outside of Kansas selling online products to people in Kansas. This is especially true because each state has different sales tax rates and rules.

Why would the state enact such a draconian measure? The state is recovering from the multiple rounds of devastating budget cuts that occurred under former governor Sam Brownback.

On the other hand, there are the Eight Wonders of Kansas. There’s the world’s largest hand-dug well, the largest freshwater marsh in the interior U.S. and a massive underground salt museum.

KS Kansas – Abbreviation is the first and last letters, traditionally Kan. or Kans. Its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita. I have never been there.

My favorite song by the group Kansas is Carry On, Wayward Son (#11 pop in 1977).

KY Kentucky – abbreviation the first and last letters, traditionally Ky., Ken., or Kent. Kentucky is one of four states designated as a Commonwealth.

I’ve been to Kentucky once, I think, to an ASBDC conference in 1993(?)

My favorite song about the state is Kentucky Woman, recorded by Neil Diamond, who wrote it (#22 pop hit in 1967), and Deep Purple (#38 in 1968). Considering the frequency I heard both versions in the day, their disappointing chart action surprises me.

The letter K for ABC Wednesday.

The I states: IA, IL, IN, oh, and ID

The Second City is now third

I map — Created / Published: New York, Published by G. Woolworth Colton; agent, Chicago, Rufus Blanchard, 1858. From the Library of Congress.

An interesting thing to me: of the four of them, three of the I states, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, are in a line, east to west. I had been to NONE of them in the 20th century. OK, I rode a train through Indiana in 1998, and I had been to Chicago, Illinois’ O’Hare airport a few times. But I never counted those.

Then in 2008, I made it to Chicago, for real, which I wrote about HERE. That was state #30 I visited. And in 2019, I made it to West Lafayette, IN, making the tally 31. At this rate, I’ll have visited every state by the year 2228.

ID Idaho Abbreviation is first two letters The usual traditional shorter version was Ida. My great aunt’s sister was named Ida. Capital and largest city: Boise. It’s in two time zones, Mountain (primarily) and Pacific.
That B-52’s song Private Idaho is irrationally stuck in my head.

IL Illinois Abbreviation is first two letters, traditional version is Ill., which is kind of sick.
Capital: Springfield, home of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
Largest city: Chicago, which used to be referred to as Second City – thus SCTV – because it was the second-largest city in the US, but now it’s third, after New York City and Los Angeles.
Arthur pointed out recently that this season was the centennial of the Red Summer, a painful picture of America’s racist past.
Here’s Chicago by Frank Sinatra.

IN Indiana Abbreviation is the first two letters, traditionally Ind.
Capital and largest city: Indianapolis.
Here’s a Wikipedia factoid: “As of 2013 Indiana has produced more National Basketball Association (NBA) players per capita than any other state. Muncie has produced the most per capita of any American city, with two other Indiana cities in the top ten… The 1986 film Hoosiers” – which is very good – “is inspired by the story of the 1954 Indiana state champions Milan High School.”
Vice-President, and former Indiana governor Mike Pence has been feuding with South Bend, IN mayor, and Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (pronounced like it’s spelled).
Strange song on a Motown label: Indiana Wants Me – R. Dean Taylor

IA Iowa First and last letters in the abbreviation, which is the traditional abbreviation, if people bothered to shorten it at all.
Capital and largest city: Des Moines.
The state gets outsized attention because it holds the first presidential caucus in the country, even before the first primary, which is in New Hampshire. Gatherings of voters select delegates to the state conventions.
The Iowa State Fair claims to be the inspiration for a novel and three movies. It is home to the world-famous Butter Cow, weighing about 600 pounds and standing 5.5 feet tall.
Here are a bunch of songs about the Hawkeye State.

For ABC Wednesday

H is for the Kingdom of Hawaii

Love, Peace, and Compassion

Hawaii.NASA earth observatory — NASA earth observatory

In a Travel Trvia post called 5 Countries That No Longer Exist, I read about the Kingdom of Hawaii. It was “founded by King Kamehameha I in 1810, about 40 years after first contact with Europeans…

“Remarkably, the political structure of the kingdom was close to a feudal European system, though its religion and customs followed the ancient Polynesian ways. The kingdom was an internationally recognized independent state, securing most of their assurances (including one from the United States) in the early 1840s.” But then it gets interesting.

“The U.S. annexed the islands as a result of the Spanish–American War in 1898 to better fight the Spanish in the Philippines, which is a whole other can of international-sovereignty-violating-worms… There’s a serious case to be made that the U.S. violated a whole bunch of international laws during the annexation, meaning we may never have had the authority to do literally any of the things we did on the island.

“Hawaiian independence is a very real possibility and there are a lot of people fighting hard for it.” While I don’t expect the state will actually secede, I find this bit of history quite fascinating.

Incidentally, “most people think that “Aloha” is a word that means both hello and goodbye” That is not true. “In Hawaiian we say ‘Aloha’ both when greeting someone and also saying goodbye. But that is not to be taken literally. The real meaning of Aloha in Hawaiian is that of Love, Peace, and Compassion.”

HI Hawaii. I DO , though, like the fact that the two-letter postal code says, “Hi!” Capital and largest city: Honolulu.

The Hawaiian Islands are “an archipelago of eight major islands, several atolls, numerous smaller islets, and seamounts in the North Pacific Ocean, extending some 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from the island of Hawaiʻi in the south to northernmost Kure Atoll. Formerly the group was known to Europeans and Americans as the Sandwich Islands, a name chosen by James Cook in honor of the then First Lord of the Admiralty John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.”

One last thing: is it Hawaii or Hawai’i? The state website has a bar that reads “Search all Hawai’i government.” Other sources suggests that the large island is Hawai’i but that the state is Hawaii. It’s still engendering great debate on the islands.

Georgia on my mind

key lime pie

midnight in the garden of good and evil I’ve been to Georgia twice. The first time was to Atlanta in 1995. The city was/is a sprawling entity. On one particular 10-line highway, we repeatedly saw cars exiting to the right, crossing three or four lanes quickly, usually directly in front of us.

What made it worse was that it was the year before the Summer Olympics, so there was plenty of construction everywhere.

I was there with my girlfriend, now my wife, visiting friends of hers. We also got to see part of the Martin Luther King Museum. Our visit to CNN involved sitting in on some program we have on a VHS tape, and nothing to play it on!

My second Georgia was to the coastal city of Savannah, in 1998, for a work conference. It’s the oldest city in the state and had some interesting historic structures. It was particularly proud of its connection to the book and then-recent film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

But the best part is that my father drove down from Charlotte, NC to hang out with me. We both arrived on Saturday night, and the conference didn’t formally start until Monday morning, so we walked around the city with some of my friends, eating key lime pie or recalling tales of my growing up.

He LOVED the city by the Atlantic Ocean and said he’d like to move there someday. Unfortunately, he died less than two years later.

Songs about Georgia:

Oh, Atlanta – Alison Krauss
Midnight Train to Georgia – Gladys Knight and the Pips
Georgia on My Mind – Ray Charles
The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia – Vicki Lawrence
Jug Band Music – the Lovin’ Spoonful

GA Georgia. Historic abbreviation: Geo. Capital and largest city: Atlanta.

GU Guam, an unincorporated organized territory of the US, Capital: Hagatna (Agana); largest city: Dededo. How the United States Ended Up With Guam

For ABC Wednesday

The phenomenon of Florida Man

around since 2013

florida man beer I’m not convinced that men in Florida are, per capita, any weirder than fellows in Oklahoma or Maryland or New York. Yet the notion of the Florida Man has been around since 2013. The meme calls attention to Florida’s supposed notoriety for strange and unusual events.

This narrative is explained HERE. “On May 12th, 2015, the Miami New Times published an article titled How Florida’s Proud Open Government Laws Lead to the Shame of ‘Florida Man’ News Stories, which cited the state’s Sunshine Act as a possible cause for the bevy of ‘Florida Man’ news stories.”

The paper “noted that freedom of information laws in Florida make it easier for journalists to obtain information about arrests from the police than in other states and that this is responsible for the large number of news articles.

“All we have to do in most cases is call the police department and ask for an arrest report, and the cops are required to give it to us. Nowadays a lot of cops simply email the reports, and some departments even post arrest records online. Some of the more dedicated weird-Florida-news reporters go through batches of arrest reports at a time.”

For instance, here are 60 examples posted in 2018:
Florida Man attacked during selfie with squirrel
thousands of gun owners in Florida planning to “shoot down” Hurricane Irma
Florida Man gets tired of waiting at hospital, steals ambulance, drives home
Florida Man breaks INTO jail to hang with friends
Florida Man denies drinking and driving, says he only swigged bourbon at stop signs

Here’s a list from Huffington Post and a description in the Urban Dictionary.

In fact, the phenomenon has engendered some reflections. It turns out that people from Florida are (slightly) better at guessing if a ‘Florida Man’ story really happened in Florida.

I’ve been to Florida twice, both to conferences in the 1990s. Once, I was in Miami during a muggy October. The other time was in Orlando, but no, I never went to Disneyworld or Universal Studios.

FL Florida – first two letter. The traditional abbreviation was Fla. Capital: Tallahassee. Largest city: Miami.

FM Federated States of Micronesia. Capital: Palikir. Largest town: Weno. It is “a sovereign, self-governing state in free association with the United States of America, which is wholly responsible for its defense.”

For ABC Wednesday