There are thousands of "10 minutes of basic research" items. You can point at any given one of them and show how easy it is to understand, but the sheer number of them makes the endeavor daunting. To navigate properly you need to hire lawyers, accountants, human resources. Possibly multiple times, to get local expertise in each state. All for a business that produces negative income to start.
Hiring those professionals, or having them available for consultation, is a core requirement for starting a real business. If you didn't budget for that, that's a poor reflection of you as a founder.
Just because it currently is that way doesn't mean it should be that way. This tax situation explicitly penalizes and actively discourages two guys starting up a single business in their respective garages across state lines.
Imagine if Jobs and Woz were starting today and lived in CA and OR. That version of Apple would have never gotten off the ground due to idiotic laws like this.
No, you really don't (human resources? Please). Nor are there thousands.
I, like many other people -- and I'm not a genius, nor an attorney -- have managed to run a small business in accordance with these rules. Was there sometimes a consult with an inexpensive lawyer around hiring, or an accountant around taxes and payroll? Sure, but that was it.
