After you click the “buy now” button and make a purchase online, you’re supposed to send the appropriate sales tax to your state government. It’s, like, a law or something. However, a study in California found that fewer than 1 percent of income tax returns included any such payment.

Either we need to find better citizens, which sounds like an awful lot of interviewing, or we should tune up the tax-collection system.

America increasingly buys its stuff via the Internet, after driving over to a friendly, locally owned store to find out what the products actually feel like.

Desperate store owner: May I please, for the love of God, help you?

Typical shopper: No, I just wanted to touch the buttons of a French press coffee maker with a santoprene frame, which it’s because of my natural curiosity. See you next year!

And so, at this point, a fairly substantial amount of tax money is falling through the cracks. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that your fine fellow Americans will get busy with housework and forget to pay $23.3 billion in taxes from out-of-state online and catalog sales next year.

You might not think that’s enough money to worry about, considering that you live in a nation that owes $15 trillion and recently listed both the Hoover Dam and Rhode Island on Craigslist.

Or you might think that every penny counts, after your congressional supercommittee failed to cut the nation’s budget. They almost hammered out a lower thermostat setting for the Rayburn House Office Building, but not quite.

(By the way, the estate of Clark Kent has objected to the use of “super” in connection with those mopes, as has the Super Bowl halftime committee, the supernova specialists at Lick Observatory and the guy who sweeps up used positrons at the Super Proton Synchrotron in Switzerland.)

This is the time of year to think about this problem, as America marks the birth of Christianity’s most hallowed figure by snapping up terrycloth bathrobes at a 70 percent discount. “The prosperity of fools shall destroy them,” says the book of Proverbs, but scholars don’t see that as a warning about shopping; it’s now considered an early attempt at trash talking.

So we’re focused on the need for lots and lots of store time in the next few days to set things right, having been told repeatedly that consumer spending makes up two-thirds of the nation’s economy. We would get back into manufacturing, but nobody will tell us how rivets work.

Clearly, big spending is the key to survival for our retailers, but let’s not forget about our state governments. Once mighty and proud, constantly bragging about the size of their capitol domes, most states are now panicky about their budgets and keep trying to change the subject to who has the coolest flag. Deficit-stricken New Jersey is pondering a change of its motto from “Liberty and prosperity” to “Like you could do any better.”

So a surge of sales tax income would come in real handy right now. Three senators have been pushing the issue in recent weeks. Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republicans Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Mike Enzi of Wyoming introduced a bill that would require online-only retailers – Amazon.com, they’re looking at you – to collect sales taxes and send them to the states where the buyers live.

It seems only fair. If we want small businesses to lead our economic comeback, we should at least make sure their online competitors are playing by the same rules.

It’s a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way. … OK, now I have to stop and deal with a phone call; it’s from an attorney representing the estate of a Mr. Clark Kent.

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com