Look Out, L.L. Bean

Attention, catalog shoppers: No new sales taxes. For now. Thrifty consumers who bought more than $183 billion worth of merchandise by mail last year welcomed last week's Supreme Court decision not to allow state taxation of out-of-state mail-order sales. But in rebuffing North Dakota's effort to collect a use tax from the Quill Corp. of Lincolnshire, Ill., the nation's largest mail-order office-product supplier, the high court punted the issue back to Congress and cleared the way for future legislative action authorizing states to impose use taxes on out-of-state consumers.

Cash-hungry state officials will lobby hard for new laws forcing mail-order companies to collect taxes from out-of-state customers; the state-government lobby claims that this would add $3 billion to their coffers this year. If permitted, California could have raked in $417.8 million in mail-order sales taxes last year alone. But this is a tough sell in an election year when jittery lawmakers get plenty of mail from catalog-shopping constituents. As Representative Byron Dorgan of North Dakota put it, "The large catalog companies have the ability -- and they've done it in the past -- to wallpaper the Congress with millions of postcards." Direct mail, after all, is their business.