It's shopping season

Nothing says holidays like articles about shopping and information about how states are trying to get their piece of the action by encouraging the payment of sales tax on online purchases. States keep talking about the billions of dollars they are losing by not being able to collect sales tax on online purchases. Meanwhile, use tax laws languish and consumers continue to bypass them, as do the states for the most part.

Rather than trying to enact new laws for sales tax on online purchases that are made out-of-state, should we put our collective heads together and try to figure out how to mobilize the consumers of our nation to pay the use taxes that they almost unanimously ignore? I don't have the solution because those use tax laws seem like they were designed to fail. But I expect state taxing agencies would love to hear some creative ideas.