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Bid to Tax Satellites Rejected
Kierthos writes: "This article updates an earlier Slashdot story about the Los Angeles County Assessor's office trying to tax satellites in orbit around the Earth. Short version: no go, the satellites don't get taxed."
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These are the levies of the tax office Los Angelas, it's five year mission to seek out and tax new revenue sources, to boldly tax where no-one has taxed before!
Reminds me of the court battle cities actually did win, that would allow them to tax any communications traffic going through cables laid within their jurisdictions. They were actually thinking about taxing per-square foot, as a way to come up with a "sensible" tax assessment, knowing full well they had no idea the value of the commerce flowing in the fiber, and copper.
Killing the Golder Goose, for sure.
Maybe they will try to tax Australian residents for using the area beneath LA County, or even the satellites who use the space beneath them for that matter.
Hehe I'd like to see LA PROVE that a satellite passed over head. They can't even catch half the people who run through the EZ Pass lanes in NJ!
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
There are/(were?) a number of space related tax reform bills currently before congress, i.e.
1) Invest in space now (of 2001)
2) Spaceport equality act (of 2001)
3) Zero gravity, zero tax act (of 2001)
4) Space tourism promotion act (of 2001)
5) The commercial spacepartnership act (inactive)
Read all about it here
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
"I don't know if there's any international law/agreement on how high a country's jurisdiction extends"
As Jerry Pournelle has pointed out, there are 5 countries in the world that can put objects INTO orbit, and two who can probably knock objects down FROM orbit (US and Russia; yes, I know, we claim we don't have such a weapon). Everyone else is free to make whatever laws they want; enforcing them would be the hard part.
sPh
I don't think they were trying to tax the satellites just because they were occassionally overhead. I believe they were trying to tax the owner of the satellites as a corporation based in L.A. that owned property, regardless of where the property was located.
Now, I don't know where Hughes corporate office is located. If it isn't located in L.A., then the tax assessor had no basis at all to attempt taxation. Their home page has a contact PO box in El Segundo, CA 90245-0956, but it doesn't say if they have even a branch there.
Don't get me wrong. I am glad the tax was shot down. Satellites cost enough already without adding taxes. Got too many taxes already.
There's a UN charta that both the US and Russia signed that states that no county can claim sovereignty of celestial bodies. Property rights are a different matter, however, and no one can really stop you from claiming ownership of a celestial body, but I think you actually have to go there! "But it passed overhead!" probably wouldn't cut it. Now if it was permanently overhead, you may have some claim but I doubt it. For an example of a company planning to claim an asteroid see Space Dev.
I was worried I'd have to start paying taxes on all my sats, you know how it is, first you buy a car, then a house, then a multi-million dollar satellite, and the government wants to stick it's grubby hands in your pockets every chance they get. Isn't it bad enough already that I'm paying social security and I could get 10 times the return by putting that money in a 2% savings account instead?
Seriously, I think the federal government should be able to tax these sats because NASA and others are very important in the regulation of space and the coordination of all the objects out there (so these satellites don't go crashing into the international space center.) It should be just enough to pay for the work the federal govt. does, but it's ridiculous for some county to say "hey, we want some money, gimmie some money" just because they can. They have nothing to do with space travel so they should keep their grubby hands out of it.
~ now you know
"no go, the satellites don't get taxed"
...but they do get their own DVD zone. Can't have astronauts "pirating" DVDs (would that make them Space Pirates?).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The fall out from this type of ruling is going to be felt quite heavily in coming years.
/. I think, but if you think about it - would you rather be charged an extra couple of percent for your bandwidth or have propoerty taxes rise AGAIN!??
We are currently taxed for driving, flying, building a home, playing with toys, eating anything non-essential and much more. Data is harder to tax, and so for the greater part we are NOT taxed for exchanging data.
Governments tax for two reasons. 1: To pay for the 'stuff' of governing and providing public facilities to the country 2: As a penalty for anti social / environmental behaviours.
As a greater proportion of our wealth is spent 'virtually' a greater portion of our 'real' expenditure will have to be taxed to ensure the books balance.
Personally, I'd rather see fair taxes. Rich people exchange data (in the main) more than poor people. So tax us. Unpopular on
no, they can't, as this story illustrates.
But there's usually a reason. For example, property taxes pay for local amenities and police. Vehicle taxes pay for the upkeep of roads and traffic signals, and the building of new ones.
"use" taxes build the price of roads into the use of roads and are thus economically efficient (the word "efficient" to an economist means "doesn't have economically harmful side-effects") because they don't "punish" unrelated sectors of the economy. An alternate way of thinking of it is, if roads are not taxed then they seem too cheap and people use them too much.
Direct taxes such as income tax and corporation tax pay for lots of stuff, mainly public goods such as defence, civil servants' wages, etc.
income taxes (corporate tax is largely an income tax) are used to transfer money from people who have it to people who don't, either directly through welfare, or indirectly by rich people paying the national defense bill for poor people. The reason for income taxes is somewhat complex, a mix of "tax where the money is" and the moral and reasonable notion that "we can't tax every piece of infrastructure efficiently, but if we tax income we are pretty sure of focusing on people who are benefitting from the infrastructure"
The other main use of taxation is as a disincentive to some activity or other (such as smoking and drinking, or in the case of fuel taxation, driving).
this may be the moral justification for those taxes, but economically it doesn't work. Demand for drugs and gambling is "inelastic" in that people do not reduce their consumption just because the price goes up. So, high taxes on these things are still efficient because they don't impact the rest of the economy by discouraging consumption. Fuel taxes don't really fall into this category in the long run, except that in the short run your demand for gas is dependent on a large capital purchase you've already committed to.
Why tax satellites? The space they orbit in requires no expenditure to maintain, and there's no reason to try putting people off launching satellites, because it costs many millions of pounds/dollars.
since the rest of your tax analysis was flawed, we wouldn't expect that you would get this part right... this tax is no different than property/excise tax. Property should not be taxed, of course, just income. But some property should not be treated differently than other property, either.
Apart from pure greed, what's the justrification behind such a proposal?
to an economist, "pure greed" is the same motivation behind every wage negotiation, every food purchase, every economic decision. Do you donate to charity? You do it because it makes you feel good, and your pure greed for that feeling makes you turn over a (usually moderate) portion of your wealth. Do you complain about the price of something that you just bought? You bought it because you wanted it more than the money you had, i.e. you thought it was a fair price that improved your property mix. It is only your pure greed that makes you complain.
The flaw here is in thinking that "pure greed" is a bad thing: pure greed is a good thing, that perfectly normal human (and animal) desire to try to enjoy the next few minutes. Greed only irritates you when it is someone else's greed, and your own greed makes us want to allocate their resources: no skin off your nose, eh?
Taken from a msgeek article:
:P NASA is technically in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act!
"Call the MPAA thought police!
According to this site, NASA paid a region-hacking company in the UK for two hacked Sony FX-1 DVD players. This is technically illegal under the terms of the DMCA, as it thwarts a content-restriction scheme.
It could be argued that the ISS is an international zone beyond the reach of US law and therefore DMCA doesn't apply. But NASA is a United States government agency and is bound by the DMCA.
I look forward to what may happen if the MPAA decides to play hardball with NASA. This sounds like a terrific case to test the (un)constitutionality of the DMCA...bwahahaha!!! "
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
"to an economist, "pure greed" is the same motivation behind every wage negotiation, every food purchase, every economic decision. Do you donate to charity? You do it because it makes you feel good, and your pure greed for that feeling makes you turn over a (usually moderate) portion of your wealth."
I was with you up to the second sentence of this paragraph. There is the minor problem that actual human beings are neither utility maximizers nor particularly rational. And even within the classical framework (a) there is no accepted way to measure "utility" so proof/falsification of these theories is essentially impossible (b) information and transactions costs are not zero, are often significant, and are usually not known or understood. With that complication much of what is "proven" in classical micro turns out not to actually apply in practice.
sPh