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The so-called Amazon-tax law isn’t a tax at all. It doesn’t impose any new obligation on Californians, who have been required for decades to pay sales taxes on goods purchased from out-of-state sellers. The law that has driven Amazon to such fits governs solely whether the tax gets added to the bill at checkout or, instead, the buyer bears the full legal burden of calculating and remitting the tax. Amazon and other online retailers may claim that it’s just too hard and too expensive for them to figure out the different sales taxes levied by each state, but of course what they really don’t want to lose is the tax-cheat business model that gives them a bottom-line advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts.