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California Considering More Internet Taxes
dcg writes "San Francisco Chronicle is reporting on how web taxes could help the states, especially California, with its budget woes. One particularly disconcerting comment is from California's Controller Steve Westly. 'In addition to sales taxes, Westly said he is considering a tax on Internet access like those that appear on telephone bills. He also is looking at a tax on software downloads.' Would this affect only purchased software, or could sourceforge.net become a source of revenue for the state..."
They are simply closing a (well-known) loophole.
If you buy expensive software (i.e. chip-design tools at >$100k per user) and you take delivery via FTP instead of physical media (CD/tape), you do not owe sales tax. On a big purchase (multi-million $$) the 8% is a BIG deal. It happens a lot in the Valley.
I'm surprised that it took the bureaucrats in Sacramento this long to find a revenue "source" this big.
They usually do. The lottery is a voluntary tax of which winnings are taxed. The only problem is that the recursive loop is that the contents is a decimal lower than one raised exponentially.
With all this taxing crap, I can't wait until the US realizes that they are shooting themselves in the foot!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
You do get taxes recursively. You pay income tax on your salary. Then when you buy something, there is a sales tax. Then the company which got your money pays taxes on it. Then they pay their employees and that gets taxes. And it repeats on an on.
There are literally hunderds of programs that they should cut but they don't. However being the typical politician Gray has decided to piss people off into allowing him to tax ANYONE and EVERYONE by raising the spectre of nuking those prized programs.
In other words, Gray is doing what he has always done. There are two kinds of government employees. Essential and non-essential.
That should be an indicator of who needs cut.
For comparison, a local county is 67 million in the hole. They refused to cut their arts budget of 6 million, now tell me, whats more important? Buying art from people who can't sell it otherwise, or paying teachers?
That is the biggest difference between libertarians and those other two. Governments currently spend money on stuff they have no business doing so. But they have the guns to back them up, the idiocy of the general public to hide behind, and many cohorts in the press and special interest groups to run cover for them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yes, Enron and the whole power debacle had its role, but only a minor one. The real root of the problem is quite simple. While the Internet bubble was pushing California state income tax revenue to unsustainable levels the state government grew to consume every penny of revenue that came in. Now that the bubble burst the state is starved for revenue. Last year Gov. Davis signed a $75B budget. This year the proposed budget is $62B including $4B increase in income taxes and other fees. Roughly a 22% year to year decrease in revenue, but back to roughly what the budget was in 1999.
Virtually every tax paying citizen and business in California is seeing their incomes and revenues reduced in a similar manner. In many cases the reduction is MUCH greater than just 22%, but we are all dealing within it our own manner. It's time that both the federal and state governments learn to have the same basic fiscal responsibility asked of citizens and business in boom and bust cycles.
During the boom there were proposals to actually give tax rebates back to the taxpayers because we were simply paying more than the state government needed to run operations. In retrospect, this would have been the wise thing to do because it would have put some brakes on the state government growing to an unsustainable level. Instead, we are now seeing the politicians scramble to protect their favorite pork projects while funding for basic services such as schools, public safety and other public infrastructure are reduced to level less than they would have been had the boom never happened.
Too often it seems people are quick to criticize those who want to see smaller government or at least put severe limits on its growth. Often there are good reasons for doing so other than the accusation such people are stingy, selfish or worse.
Any one actually interested in seeing the numbers may be interested in this link. Check out the Chart A, Historical Data, General Fund Balance document.
Ditto. My unemployment benefits are gone. Nobody is hiring. I'm 43 and can't easily retrain (especially since I have no money to pay for retraining).
California is already one of the highest taxed states in the country. We have sales tax, income tax, employment taxes, and anything else you can think of. We also have idiots like Davis and his cronies sucking money into their personal black holes.
Special note to Governor Davis:
Here's a simple lesson in economics. When there is less money to go around, you must spend less! Even my 12 year old daughter can understand this basic concept. Stop trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of me, I don't have any. Stop driving business out of the state and you might be able to collect some income taxes from a few hundred thousand currently unemployed tech workers. Then you can piss it away with more of your pork-barrel projects that you use to pay off your political pals, you criminal piece of shit.
-- Will program for bandwidth