Online shopping is a major facet of college life. As college students, we shop online for items ranging from books to food to clothes and everything in between. The reason we do so is because we can often find items at prices more suitable to a college student’s budget. An unnecessary online sales tax would jeopardize that.

Recent talks in Congress and in various state legislatures have leaned towards the passage of an online sales tax. While many people shop online, this tax would impact college students the most.

It is a common free-market choice to shop where you will buy the most amount of goods for the least amount of money. As consumers, we naturally want to pay as little as possible. We work hard for our money and want to be able to buy a sufficient amount of items with our paychecks.

For me, I try to order my textbooks for classes online so I can save money from having to buy them at the bookstore.  I am definitely not alone in that regard.  An online sales tax levied on those books will not only reduce the overall savings, but could also eliminate the savings completely depending on the rates.

And that’s another problem. Countless jurisdictions exist throughout the U.S. that would require different percentages for this proposed tax. The enforcement of such a tax seems rather strenuous and it is not entirely clear on how to go about it.

I suppose that at checkout there could be a place for the customer to put in a zip code, but I fear that could lead to some problems as well. Customers may accidentally, or not, put the wrong zip code or may not know the zip code of the area they are in. The less confusion that we can have in our tax collection process the better off we will be.

There is also the argument that we pay a sales tax when we walk into a store and buy something so it only makes sense to extend that to online purchases as well.  And that argument does make sense at face value. This argument is especially persuasive when you see the stat that approximately $20 billion is not collected per year in revenue due to the inability to collect taxes on out-of-state online purchases.

But why do we need another tax? Yes, taxes are good because they pay for our schools, our infrastructure and many other societal necesities. But too much taxation can be detrimental as well.

In order for money to continue circulating through the economy, it needs to be spent. With so many taxes, less money will inevitably be put back into the economy.

We pay federal income, state income, social security and many other taxes on a regular basis. Enough of our paychecks, which college students desperately rely on, is already siphoned away from us before we can even see it. An online sales tax will only take more money away from money-needing college students.

More than anything, an online sales tax will negatively impact online commerce. As I said earlier, the reason we use online shopping is because of the savings we can incur. If those savings disappear, it only makes sense that people will be less likely to shop online because their dollar won’t stretch as far as it used to.

When commerce decreases, retailers will have to rethink the way they do online sales. With fewer sales, they may have to raise prices to accommodate for the lost revenue. Or, they may just cut certain items from their selection of online merchandise. Either way, an online sales tax will have a negative impact on ecommerce.

No matter how you slice it, an online sales tax just doesn’t make sense. It’s bad for commerce and bad for students.