Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

Steve Malanga. Steve's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the senior editor of city

journal. He writes about urban economies, business communities, public policy, and much else.

And his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, New York Post, and many other

publications.

He's the author of several books, including Shakedown, the continuing conspiracy against

the American taxpayer. Today, though, we're going to discuss his story, the tax nexus

cometh, which appears in our spring issue and details the complex and inefficient tax system that online

retailers and businesses are now contending with. So Steve, thanks, as always, for joining us.

My pleasure. So businesses have been urging Congress to craft new laws that would define

state's proper application of sales and business taxes to the

online economy, the rise of the digital economy, you know, in which firms and customers and

employees are frequently residing in different jurisdictions has magnified the need for a simplified way of dealing

with this kind of economic exchange. Yet in its, as you document, in its 2018, South Dakota versus

Wayfair decision, the Supreme Court overturned the doctrine that states may only tax firms physically

present in their geography, which opens online retailers and other businesses to demands

from states across the country. So I wonder if you could briefly describe the wayfair decision

and what kind of problems it's creating with regard to taxes

and firms that operate, you know, in a digital space? Yeah. So the Wafer decision was

specifically about sales taxes because there had been previous Supreme Court decisions

that had prohibited

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