Here in North Carolina, on the income tax forms, we have this new (in the last few years) entry for "use tax". Essentially, it amounts to getting the consumer to pay sales tax for things purchased out-of-state.

I got to thinking about this earlier today and came to a conclusion I hadn't arrived at before.

First, it annoys me that this exists because sales tax is a tax on doing business. Consumers don't pay sales taxes; businesses do. It's not as if the state has deputized every business in order for them to collect taxes. Now, businesses generally pass that tax along to the consumer, which is fine, as it's a legitimate cost of doing business, but it's not as if we are the ones the tax is applied to. So it bothers me that the state has put the burden of sales tax directly on the consumer in certain instances. But that's really just a bother.

The real problem is that Article 9 of the US Constitution states that states shall make no law interfering with interstate commerce. (That's my pseudo-constitutionally worded paraphrase.) This includes tariffs, etc. Now, if levying a fee on purchasing products from out of state isn't interfering with interstate commerce, I don't know what is. It seems to me that this "use tax" is wildly unconstitutional.

But no one seems to have brought any action against it. Am I missing something?