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Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs
Vellmont writes "From the state that brought you the 2000 presidential election debacle, now comes the proposal to tax your LAN. The Orlando Business Journal is reporting that the the state of Florida is thinking about putting a 9% tax on LANs within the state. Exactly what they will be taxing isn't clear, since the tax amounts to 9% of... something. Will taxing the electrical wires within your home be next?"
The original intent of most communications taxes was to subsidize the government's cost for the publically provided communications infrastructure... if the gov't is going to be supplying me with a free GigaBit ethernet LAN, then sure, they can tax it's use.
Get with the program people... sounds as wacky as Seattle's proposed tax on espresso!
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Here's why you'll start seeing more crazy-sounding initiatives like this "lan tax":
1. Outsourcing jobs overseas = massive amounts of lost taxes for USA. Since IT jobs were hit the hardest and California was the hottest IT area, it doesn't take a genius to figure out one substantial reason why they're in a budget crisis (which is a taste of things to come for our federal budget).
2. Huge tax cuts without requirements on how it should be spent = lost tax revenues that might not be spent at all or spent in ways that improve the economy. This is kinda like giving a total stranger $100K and expecting him to spend it in ways that help you while not giving him any expectations on how to spend it (i.e. he can spend it all on building offshore infrastructure to move even more US jobs overseas!).
3. Our president's failure to build consensus in the UN to attack Iraq and then being exposed for making false justification statements means that other countries are less willing to send their young soldiers to die in Iraq. This means more of OUR taxes going to pay for this ongoing fiasco which will likely INCREASE the odds of future terrorist attacks & boycotts against US-made products.
4. and so on including our mounting budget deficit which is like running up a huge credit card bill with mounting interest that YOU and I must pay later with...you guessed it--more freaking taxes than EVER given the aging demographics of babyboomers and their impact on social security, medicare and reduced collection of income taxes from them as they retire.
NOTE: $100K is roughly how much VP. Cheney will save in taxes in one year due to the Bush tax cuts. Since that money has to come from somewhere, many of our brave soldiers sacrificing their lives in Iraq will receive PAY CUTS of around $200/month.
Don't be surprised if you find important services like public schools and homeland security facing massive budget cuts in the future--it doesn't HAVE to happen but I don't see a way out if we continue managing our government in the most idiotic way I've seen in decades.
I feel sorry for the poor soul who'll get elected as our president next because he's gonna have an almost impossible task on his hands (he'll need to take massive and very unpopular action to fix this mess being created by the current politicians).
Because it wasn't taxed yet
Where do you live?
Around here, when we were first permitted to get to the Internet via a phone line, there was already a tax on every phone bill. Then the cable folks supplied Internet service, and part of every cable bill is a tax. I've bought a few wires (thin ethernet first, then the hub that the vendors have forced on us for the last few years, all to connect a few home computers, and part of every purchase is a tax.
We need electricity to run our computers, and part of every electric bill is - you guessed it - a tax.
So what they're talking about is a special, higher tax for those of us on the Net. Every little bit of the net has been taxed right from the start; they just want networks taxed even higher than any other sort of comm or power equipment.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This reminds me of the bizarre logic that was used by advocates of the 'Intangibles' tax we collect here in KS. They said that if you invested your money in farm land
you'd pay property taxes on it, but if you just put it in the bank and 'clipped coupons' you don't pay them, so it's only fair to tax intangibles too.This reasoning completely ignores the fact that the capital that your investment goes to is already subject to property tax, and taxing intanbibles qua intangibles is double taxation, just as taxing computer networks is as well.
Before anyone clicks on the Reply to This link to pipe up that it's double taxation on the telcos too... yes, it is. It's an extra tax they pay in exchange for having a government-mandated monopoly. They pass that tax along to their captive customer base, which is oblivious to the fact that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Don't be so quick to dismiss all regulations as unnecessary interference. Some are nothing but lobbyists freezing out the competition, but others addressed real problems.
The bottom line is if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is being baked with an orange glaze and served to hungry diners, it's a duck. Paypal is a bank and the sooner it is treated as one the better off everyone will be -- too many people have been burned by arbitrary and opaque dispute resolution policies. VoIP that replaces conventional phone service *is* phone service and the users need to have the same protections (e.g., against unauthorized wiretaps, arbitrary charge dispute resolutions, etc.) as regular phone service users, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
'Oh, so they have the internet on computers now do they?'
I think that quote about sums up this plan.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!