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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..."
Amazing how quickly they look to tax more instead of looking at their budget and ridding themselves of all the bloat of government.
how long would it take for every server with any kinda taxable activity to relocate to Nevada? or Vanatu? You can bet that after any government starts taxing something, it'll never be free again. The power to tax is the power to destroy. This is an opening move in the destruction of high tech in California.
My dad worried about out-sourcing union jobs to Mexico. I worry about out-sourcing programming jobs to India. What's to stop the out-sourcing of all the other high-paying professions to low-tax areas?
A popular quote from most end-user license "agreements" (which are all unethical, anyway). Different tax rules apply for license transactions than sales transactions.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Likewise, Internet sales taxes are desperately needed. Not only are the well-off more likely to purchase things online, but the fact that they can dodge sales tax by doing so while the poor must pay when they go to the local stores is nearly an insult: this is one of those 'rich getting richer' schemes that doesn't get much airplay, but it should.
I'll agree that it's been a pretty fun ride, but we've already discovered that the Internet isn't free. Now it's time for the tax collectors to catch up.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
All this will do is accelerate the exodus of high tech firms from California. Many companies are already moving operations to cheaper states, Sun for example is moving a lot of its operations to Colorado. All this taxing is going to do is accelerate that process and leave California with a smaller tax base in the future. Few politicians seem to think more then 2 or 4 years down the road, basically what they need to do to get reelected.
Patently False?
Not
quite.
Sure, California's scheme for "deregulation" had some major flaws, but that doesn't excuse Enron, as well as other energy corporations from committing wire fraud, to the point of almost bankrupting the state.