Leigh Bader is the proud owner of the Pine Oaks Golf Course in South Easton, Massachusetts, a little town about forty-five minutes south of Boston, where he runs one of the largest pro shops in the nation. Leigh developed a love of golf in college while attending the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It was there that he started his career, working as an assistant pro at a local golf course. After living and traveling around the country, Leigh settled down in South Easton, where he worked his way up through the organization to reach his current position as the owner of the course.

While Leigh takes great pride in his local operations, eBay has really transformed his business over the past decade. In the late 1990’s, Leigh became very interested in developing a website for his pro shop to sell golf equipment online, but it was just too expensive at the time. Instead, he turned to eBay’s ready-made marketplace, where he was able to connect to a much larger customer base across the country and around the world. Today Leigh is one of eBay’s top sellers.

Leigh’s online business now provides jobs to 57 local employees, but he is concerned that their jobs are at risk due to the government’s efforts to impose an Internet Sales Tax on online businesses. He believes that an Internet Sales Tax would be extremely difficult for his business to manage due to the thousands of tax jurisdictions across the country, and he worries that the added cost of dealing with these new taxes could put his and thousands of other small businesses out of business.

“I am not opposed to sales tax. However, clumsy, bureaucratic collection or costly third party ‘solutions’ add burdens and unwarranted costs,” he said.