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States Fight Internet Tax Ban, Cite VoIP Concern
PetiePooo writes "From an article at PCWorld: The Multistate Tax Commission is fighting a bill which makes the moratorium on internet taxes permanent. Their complaint is that it could be interpreted to include VoIP telephony such as Packet8 and Vonage, and they would lose that lucrative tax base as people switch from incumbent providers. The House has already approved the bill. When will the politicians figure out that VoIP is a going to end up as a product, not a service? Voice will be just another form of data. Here's another related article."
Change the tax system.
Change it so that the companies providing the physical links are the ones that pay the tax.
This will solve all the issues with VOIP
8-bit encoding at 8000 samples per second. The raw PCM signal is 64kbps. Some older systems used 7-bit encoding which produced a 56kbps stream.
By time your voice enters the big multiplexers, a lot of that is recovered. Any bits covering time you aren't speaking are discarded. The remaining stuff is compressed to about 16kbps for longhaul transmission.
As for your 56k modem problem. The carrier cannot excede 1/2 of the sample rate. Remember when you has a 300 BAUD modem? Then it became 14.4k with no BAUD on the end. That was when the actual data rates became higher than the carrier. Basicly, a combination of FM and AM along with phase changes allows a 4khz carrier to contain 53kbps of data. It's pretty creepy stuff once you start reading about it.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Not on capital gains. Capital gains are gains from economic growth. If you want to encourage investment and growth, the capital gains tax should be as low as possible (ideally 0%). The lower the tax, the greater chance the average return on investment will be positive. Just because for the most part only the wealthy pay cap gains taxes does not mean that it is a good tax.
Income taxes are preferable to cap gains. They should be progressive, but not so much as to punish economic achievement in the top brackets.
Consumption taxes are probably the best taxes as far as doing the least economic damage. Of these, luxury taxes are the best as they hit those who can afford it the hardest and taxes on food and gasoline the worst because they hit everybody equally hard regardless of income.
A little left of centre is "Democrat"? Sorry, but no. In the rest of the world that's classed as extreme right-wing, if not fascist.
We could get rid of all all this tax bickering with a taxation plan that's been discussed for years but never taken seriously. Outlaw all taxes except sales tax. The federal government would impose a national sales tax on consumer purchases only, and would disburse an annual refund equal to the tax rate times whatever they say is the poverty level. ALL OTHER TAXES would be eliminated.
The flat refund is there to make the sales tax non-regressive, that is, to avoid disproportionally taxing the poor. To meet the federal budget the tax would have to be about 20%. If the federal govt defined poverty level income as $15,000/year, then everybody would get a $3000 refund, which means poor people get all their sales tax back, richer people get back only a fraction. It's a self-graduating tax scale using only 2 numbers, numbers not hidden in a forest of deductions, exemptions and loopholes.
Cash registers would tell you what your tax is every time you buy something. States would collect sales tax from retailers as they do now, and would turn over the feds' share. The IRS would shrink to a small office with only enough employees to deal with their counterparts in 50 states, rather than with 12 million businesses and over 100 million taxpayers. The maze of business taxes currently built into the price of everything would go away. There would be no income declaration forms, no 4000-page IRS code, no 105,000 IRS employees, no tax accountants, tax consultants, tax lawyers, tax lobbyists, etc. All of that mess would go away. Congress would have only 2 numbers to manipulate, and they would have to do it right out in the open.