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Tennessee to Tax Software as Property?
thatkidkel writes "The Chattanooga Times Free Press is reporting that 'a state board is proposing a sweeping change to make computer software used in business subject to property taxes, a move that some business leaders contend could drive up costs and hurt job growth in Tennessee.'"
I imagine it would be hard to tax free software, wouldn't it? This could be "Yet Another Reason"(tm) to move to open source.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That pretty much seems to say it all when public officials view taxation as "significant chunks of change", rather than the basis for sustaining government and infrastructure.
You might have a point if he actually was a public official. The chamber of commerce is a business organization, not an arm of the government. Their purpose is to help each other out, which sometimes includes lobbying the state, but that does not make any of them "public officials."
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
How do you tax a revokeable roight-to-use as property?...Maybe they can tax the right to vote, and other abstractions as well.
No more outlandish than the idea that an algorithm or a business method, or a gene sequence can be property. Of course, that's pretty outlandish.
Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.
I have yet to see the politician who can resist a brand new source of revenue to pocket simply because "it's a bad idea" or "it makes no sense".
-=Maggie Leber=-
You have to view this understanding the tax problems in Tennessee. Currently the state has basically no state income tax. When the state legislature talked about instituting one a few years ago, a large group of (apparently upper middle class) citizens went on a near riot outside the legislature.
The citizens have little trust that the state spends the money well, so they fight all tax increases. Its relatively easy to increase existing tax rates, so TN has huge regressive, sales taxes. However, these are so high now that people often cross the borders or go online buy big ticket items.
The result is the state legislature trying to push through a tax that few people feel directly affected by.
Hopefully you don't have these sorts of problems.
Yea, and this is one of the many reasons that I moved from Chattanooga to Atlanta, a hundred miles south. Stupid tools running the show here. Chattanooga politics is a ridiculous game, and it's what keeps this town from growing. That and the rich phonies on the mountain controlling everything down in the city.
Things tend to be a little more backward here in Chattanooga than I have seen in other regions in the US.
Don't be a dumb ass -- There is no Senator Robert Cash. The story is fake, and you've bought it.
Stop being so gullible and get some critical thinking skills.
I've had a recording studio in Nashville since 1979, and TN doesn't need a reason to tax you, they just do. Al Gore co-sponsored the original bill that taxed digital audio recorders and blank tape, cassettes, and CDs in the 80's, which we all pay to this day. TN also charges my business a tax on my personal property that I use at my business, and I have been audited on that. The state government is an open maw run by the lobbyists who write the laws, and most of the state legislature are the kind of dim bulbs that would pass this without reading it.
Sorry, you're wrong. I won't patronise you and explain how you're wrong, but I'd just like to say that it's innacurate simplifications like this that lead to the public mindset of GPL software as being "usable by anyone for any purpose", undermining its credibility in the public eye and leading to poorly-informed software companies infringing without realising and then trying to cover it up when they find out that 80% of the code they wrote is technically GPL.
it's true what they say, the best way to get people to believe something is to repeat it incessantly. The GPL is by no means free code, or code that's given away. There's no monetary return, but there is a strict legal expectation of ideas flowing both ways. If you use it, one way or another, you'll pay. Of course, most of us are paying what we'd gladly share, under identical conditions.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Well, technically, you don't really "own" the property (land) either---stop paying taxes on it (or die), and, well, it's no longer "yours".
If you think you `own' your land, you're fooling yourself. There are ways of legally taking your land away from you with little or no compensation (even while you're alive).
Sorry, you are wrong. There are many Robert Cash's in America, but none of them have been elected to the US Senate. Before you just post "wrong" again please do some research, and if you still think this is real then please do tell the state Robert Cash represents and his party affiliation.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
... are they going to tax it based on how many copies I have made of it? If I put MS Windows on 100 PCs legally, I have to either buy 100 copies, or get some enterprise licensing that still amounts to a discount times 100 or so, well more than the base price of one copy. Yet with many retail open source packages, I buy just one copy and can install it on those 100 PCs. And what if I downloaded it? Does that count the same as buying one copy?
What if I have one piece of software worth say $100 and use it on 2 PCs, and have another piece of software worth about the same but use it on 50 PCs? Is that going to be taxed differently? What if both are installed on all PCs? What if all software is accessible to all PCs via network file sharing?
While I have some concerns over being taxed on it (aside from the fact that I don't live in Tennessee, though this could potentially happen in other places, too), I'm actually more concerned about the impact that as-yet-unknown methods of counting will have on how computer and networks have to be managed. For example, it can be very convenient to have every program accessible from every computer on the network, but if the tax structure counts each PC the software is usable from (as opposed to is used from, which would be even harder to do), then I would be forced to make technical changes in the network structure that have no technical merits.
If I did live in Tennessee, I guess I would have to put my data center in another state.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's pretty simple to spot the cause whenever anyone in Tennessee proposes new technological legislation... It's generally corruption, pure and simple. Someone who would clearly benefit from this happening has simply been passing out the bribe money. Louisiana might be have been polled as the most corrupt state government, but Tennessee works hard at catching up with them.
If software is taxed as property, then it's going to be able to have it's value depreciated as well. This is just going to mean a tax break on software for companies who use a lot of it, particularly when it comes to software that comes from a company who tends to obsolesce their old releases with new ones every three years. This will in turn allow the consultants who originally got these companies trapped in the never-ending renewal agreements with no way to test a migration to some other platform, to convince these companies to spend more money on their software, because with the tax break Uncle Sam is picking up part of the tab.
There's another sinister side of this as well. Leased equipment is not taxed the same way, so neither would leased software. Taxing _owned_ software would give a distinct advantage to companies dealing in mere site-licences, since it would be a simple wording clarification to make these entirely equivalent to the software leasing agreements that they already are.
Let's look at some of the other telling details... The board *proposing* this change admits they do not know how much money this would bring in. Normally these guys have a very clear idea of how much money a proposed tax is going to represent--so what's the source of their interest in trying to get the money in the first place? (Bribe money. Pure and simple)
Greetings and Salutations...
Well, first off, this is hardly as over the top an idea as one might first think. Recently, the county mayor announced that they were short of funds
for the many great projects making "our" lives easier, and, that it looked like they were going to have to crank property taxes up again. Well, this caused much fuss and furor, so in the spirit of compromise, he put a proposition on the ballot to double the wheel tax. Not only was this one of those cleverly worded ones where, to vote AGAINST the wheel tax one had to vote "YES", but,
they had a big push about the property tax right before the election...all this
scared the sheeple, and now we have a much higher wheel tax, and, so far, little to show from it.
Of course, the suggestion that the government actually cut back on the spending was never even mentioned. For what it is worth, the county has FIVE helicopters...for a county with 250,000 or so residents. LA County only has two or three, the last time I heard...and they have a MUCH nicer tax base to bleed there. There are multiple other such examples of excess and wastage, of course. That is common in all areas these days...alas.
Regards & Merry Christmas
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/ senators_cfm.cfm
Nope
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I own a business in Tennessee, and I can tell you that state government is EXTREMELY unfriendly towards operating in this state. You have to pay countless petty fees and taxes for any aspect of operation, and then you have a HUGE tax called the "Franchise and Excise" tax. This worthless tax is absolutely just a cash grab. It is a 6% tax on NET profits after all other tax is paid, and is simply a "right to operate in Tennessee" tax.
If you use it, one way or another, you'll pay.
False. If you just use software, and don't modify it, you never have to pay anything for GPL programs.
All those normal people who want to use Linux (the same way they might use Windows) get it for free. The only ones who need to "pay" (in some sense) are those who wish to distributed modified versions, which isn't something you could legally do with proprietary code anyhow.
For anyone without the ability to meaningfully edit a program, GPL is just like public domain.