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."

Comments

Funny, but brings up a serious idea...

[Motherfucking Shit]

I think that there should be a tax imposed on people/corporations who file civil lawsuits and lose them. This would not apply to everyone who lost a lawsuit, only to those who initiated the suit and subsequently lost. If someone sued you and won, you would not be taxed, and neither would they.

For example, suppose that SCO sues IBM, and SCO loses. SCO should then have to pay a tax to the government for having wasted taxpayer money by tying up the judicial system with a suit which was found to be without merit. After all, assuming such suit makes it to trial, we (the taxpayers) are the ones footing the bill for the judge, the jury duty pay, the court reporters' salary, the cost of operating the court facilities during the trial, etc.

This would kill two birds with one stone:

a) Cut out a lot of bullshit frivolous lawsuits

b) Make the government a bit of bank on those who went ahead with said bullshit frivolous lawsuits

Who's with me? Vote Motherfucking Shit in 2004... :)

An analogy....

[wowbagger]

Believing that giving more money to the government will reduce deficits is like believing that buying an alcoholic another drink will slake his thirst.

The only real way to solve this problem is to put measureable, non-revokable penalties on government officials who overspend - for example, by saying that Congress shall not be paid, nor accrue retirement benefits, during any year in which the government runs a deficit (and a deficit shall be defined simply as "spending more money than you took in", no more funny accounting tricks).

We must be able to run a deficit during times of crisis (think World War II), but there needs to be a strong disincentive to prevent perpetual crisis.