Slashdot Mirror
Internet Tax Imminent?
jhigh writes "Proposals to tax the Internet are gaining steam as state legislators see a giant pot of money just waiting to be dipped into. "At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.""
Now where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, here! And it's even a link to the exact same article...
This guy's the limit!
I already pay PST/GST on my net connection, and I pay taxes [or duties] on packages bought online. They want to tax on top of the tax I already pay?
How the hell do you tax email? What if you run your own server?
Step 1. Understand technology
Step 2. Legislate it
Step 3. Represent your constituents.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The less taxes, the better. Removing taxes removes money from the Government. Removing money from the Government removes power. A less powerful Government is always a good thing.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
I pay for access. My ISP pays taxes on their revenue. Does that not count?
My ISP pays the owner of lines they lease. The line owner pays taxes on their revenue. Does that not count?
My ISP pays other ISP's in access agreements. They all pay taxes. Does that not count?
The service providers make revenue. They pay taxes on the revenue. Does that not count?
On top of the services there are advertisers. They make revenues and pay taxes. Does that not count?
It seems to me the whole system is already covered.
When is the tea party?
Let's get businesses off of the Internet, and take it back to what it's supposed to be:
A global pornography repository.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Question: Why are brick and motar stores better? it's less efficient to browse a huge store than to use the net and order from a warehouse. Why can't you have local stores run shops on the web?
I think given the choice of ordering from Ottawa, and ordering from Hong Kong, I'd rather order from Ottawa given the selection, price, and reputation are up to it. I doubt I'm alone in this thought process.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If they're taxing the tubes, does any commerce that goes through them get marked up, thus hiking prices for the consumer? I mean, fantastic, well done Uncle Sam - you've discovered a new and massive source of revenue, which incidentally buggers a large and growing element in your economy! Way to combat the national debt and fight the next dotcom bubble-burst.
And, more importantly, I'd like to know how this affects other countries. How many key internet services are run from or through the US? ICANN, DNS etc... all this and net-neutrality too. Why does the world seem slightly more fucked up every time you get up in the morning?
Sorry, I'm done. You can mod me down now.
Meta will eat itself
This is VERY good news. Just the other day I was complaining to my friends how I don't pay enough in taxes. I mean Federal, state, FICA, Medicare, sales tax, gas tax, car tax at purchase, car excise tax every year, property tax, car renewal tax every year, car inspection tax every year, tax on cell phone service, tax on cable service, tax on internet service, tax on food, etc. etc. This is not enough! I must be taxed more!
33% of every work week is worked just to pay the big 3 in taxes. I wonder what it is when you factor in all the above (and anything I missed). At some point something as got to give.
You know what puts local businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting me? Lack of selection. For example, if I want to watch a film, I add it to my Netflix queue. Too many times I go to Ballbuster or Hollywood Video and they don't have the films I want to watch. Same with books, music, beer brewing supplies, cooking accesories, etc. I live in a city of 50,000 but do a good portion of my shopping online --- and it isn't to dodge the sales tax. Screw the local businesses. They dont cater to me.
Deleted
Lots of crazy implications here by taxing online sales.
Watch the pendulum swing back toward brick-and-mortar stores. Previously I would go to the showroom or store to physically see/touch/learn about a product, then go back home and order it online (because it would invariably be cheaper). Taxing the product online makes me less inclined to take that additional step if I decide to make the purchase. YMMV.
This is going to hurt the online-only shops, as the taxes will dip into profits. Some small shops (and startups) are only in business because a physical shop (either buying, building or leasing) was simply not feasible, and taxation is not going to help.
How is this going to work if the collecting of funds and the supply-chain fulfillment happens outside of the taxing authority's jurisdiction? If I'm a US business setting up shop in the Bahamas and decide to sell goods made and warehoused in China, and drop-shipping from there back to US customers, what authority would anyone on US soil have to force me to pony up the taxes back to the States? (BTW, I'm just asking... I don't own or operate any business as of this writing.)
How would any government (State and/or Federal) plan to enforce any legislation it plans, with regard to online taxation? Seems I may not have a lot to worry about, given it's track record in reducing and regulating spam. (I don't know about you all, but last week's arrest of Robert Soloway didn't do much to unclog any of my Inboxes).
If successful, all this may do is make the small shops run away. Who will this help, anyway?
Did anyone think about the implications beyond "oooohhh... free money!"...?!
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I come from North Carolina. We invented NASCAR raceing because we got bored from bootlegging. Outwitting revenuers has been a sport here for a century. If we get not just a sales tax on the connection, but a "connection tax," will my open AP "WardriversWelcome" become a bootlegging operation?
The government, here and elsewhere, has shown a great willingness to try and control access to and content on the internet. However, direct control will equal censorship, and will always be declared unconstitutional. But if the internet can be licensed and taxed, the states can effectively control who can get connections. Imagine taxing internet connections at the same level as alcohol, somewhere between 25-62% in NC. Just imagine how many people that could price out of the market, and how onerous the effect would be on the rest of us. Imagine a bandwith tax sold to curtail piracy, but effectively cutting off Linux distributions.
Maybe bootlegging will come back into fashion again. Instead of stills we'll have WAPs, but we'll still have the revenuers with the machine guns, dynamite, and axes.
I agree. Making sales taxes apply to internet purchases makes sales taxes slightly less regressive than they already are. That is, if you spend 50% of your income on purchases subject to sales tax (as the poor are likley to do since things like food is a larger part of your budget) you pay a greater percentage of your income in sales tax than people who are more affluent. The wealthy spend a smaller percentage of their income on things subject to sales tax and are thus taxed at a lower rate.
For example:
Person X: $2000/month take home pay of which $400 is spent on things subject to a 5% sales tax. He pays $20/month in sales tax - or 1%.
Person Y: $8000/month take home pay of which $1000 is spent on things subject to sales tax. He pays $50/month in sales tax - or 0.6%.
So sales tax is inherently regressive. When sales tax doesn't apply to internet purchases, that means that those with internet access (the more affluent) pay less sales tax than the poor. So taxing internet purchases makes those who are more affluent (and more likely to purchase things from the internet) pay even less in taxes.
So I think this is EXTRA good!
Ron Paul is against taxation of the internet. If you don't want to pay extra internet taxes, vote for Ron Paul - first in the republican primary, then in the presidential election next year.
Sam has one liberty, which he sacrifices for one security. Can you tell me what Sam has now?
You'll vote them out of office. You'll write a letter. You'll run for office. But than again you realize you are too lazy to do all that. It's hard. You've failed, again.
Sure you work hard, and then bury yourself in work so you wont have to think about it. You, American voters, would even allow them to tax your income without a fight. Once, long ago, you had a spine and got upset about a 3% increase in the tax of tea, based on how the money was going to be used. Now you allow yourselves to be taxed at an insane level that nullifies the concept of liberty almost completely, seeing as you are a slave for almost half a year to taxes. Liberty or death? That's a good deal of both.
Please wake up all you smart computer people. Why is it the collective forces of the internet can create amazing projects such as software, operating systems, and the odd Groklaw, but has yet to create a great project for "hacking", tweaking, and tuning government via an organized effort of lobbying, letter writing, and education?
Come on. You sit there and allow someone to take almost six months of your life per year with only the smallest whimper? If that's the case almost nothing will gain your outrage.
Once again your bluff is being called. What are you going to do about it?
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Whenever this subject comes up I always marvel at the stupidity of suggesting a tax on e-mail. Not only is it unjustifiable, it's unenforceable.
E-mail removes revenue from the post office, but who cares? The USPS can hire fewer mail carriers as their volume decreases. E-mail runs mostly (if not entirely) over private infrastructure. There is no justification for an e-mail tax, because the government is not providing any significant e-mail related services. Even if you like the idea of Internet access taxes and Internet sales taxes, a tax on e-mail is simply unjust.
And how would we implement an e-mail tax? Even if we decided that it made sense for some reason - if we thought it would make spam uneconomical, for example - it's all over private infrastructure. How could we force SMTP servers to fairly account for the number of SMTP transactions they perform? E-mail server providers like Microsoft and Novell can be forced to build immutable, proprietary reporting into Exchange and Groupwise and other products, but the most common SMTP server is open source. If you are charged a cent per 100 messages you could easily recompile the SMTP daemon to be more generous. And what's to stop people from setting up new servers for unlimited e-mail? A tax on e-mail is unenforceable. I'd be surprised anyone is talking about it, if I didn't know as much about Congress as I do.
Good. The sooner, the better. I can't wait to see the consumer-whores freak out over not being able to dodge sales tax at the expense of their local communities! Bring back local businesses. Make Net businesses compete on the same level as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
Thank you, my luddite friend.
Internet retailers are more efficient and usually pay their employees more than local businesses. They require fewer employees and serve more customers.
The thing is: The middleman shouldn't exist in the first place, if you think about it. The internet has middlemen competing and makes their role in the process less and less prevalent.
I used to work for one. I made 20% more than the average best buy employee starting, and I had nothing more than a high school diploma. I worked my way up to supervisor and could have even had health benefits if I had actually been full time. The place I worked for, in spite of all this, pays its employees less than most warehouses.
This new tax will help some local businesses. However, for the most part, the internet will continue to replace these businesses even on a 'level playing field'.
And on a slightly less related note: Is anyone else annoyed that the government pursues any possible source of revenue? People do not want to pay taxes, and the government makes more than enough money to do everything it should be doing. The solution to the budgetary crises across the US should be obvious: Cut spending. I guess it's a lot harder to shrink government than to steal more money from the people. Sales taxes are especially bad because they disproportionately tax the poor (poor pay a higher % of their income to a sales tax than others do).
Latewire
If they do attempt to tax e-mail, or create a per-e-mail fee, or tax Internet use...they would essentially be double-taxing us. We are already taxed for the price of the Internet service...which includes fees and taxes for whatever line you get for your service.
If the government really wanted to put a per-use tax on services like the Internet or e-mail...then they have to completely overhaul how we pay for the service in the first place (which again, is ALREADY taxed).
The current situation where brick and mortar stores must pay state taxes and on-line stores do not is clearly wrong and must be remedied. Tax loopholes like this create unintended public policy pressure. I just bought a bike from performance Bike shop. If I had bought it a week earlier I would not have had to pay sales tax. But that week the e-tailer opened a brick mortar store 200 mines away from me in my state. Suddenly I can't shop on-line from that company just because they have a store in the state that's too far from me to be practical. Liewise for apple products. These are unintended artifacts of this botched internet tax free zone law.
All internet retailers should have to pay the appropriate state taxes. Even this will not be perfect, since given differences in how states tax it's not clear how to tax an e-tailer that operates out of a property tax driven state when they sell to a customer in a sales tax driven state. But this is a much lesser evil to remedy than the current situation.
Now let's turn to the peril. Right now we have an easy to apply rule. No taxes on internet sales unless there is a brick and mortar presence in the state. Once we get rid of that then legislators may covet levying all sorts of other taxes on internet sales. Sort of like how our phone and other telecom bills get larded up with hard to spot taxes and "fees". Some states might adopt protectionist provisions to protect local stores from national ones. That's not neccessarily bad in it self--it's a state's prerogative to do so short on interfering with interstate commerce. But that tort of meddling is likely to leave open all sorts of tax abuse opportunities.
Thus the parent poster is totally wrong that more taxes are bad. Indeed the more ways to tax people the more possible it is to work out fair tax structures than minimize artifactual consequences. But the parent poster's paranoia is justified. given more ways to tax states sometimes will tax more. The solution to the latter problem is quite simple. have the state set a maximum tax revenue figure that is the combination of all sources. then the state is left to argue over how to distribute that figure over the sources of taxes rather than rasing the final sum.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, for one thing, there are the ethical implications of not doing so. Believe it or not, there are people in our society who cannot take care of themselves through no fault of their own. Why should we allow people to needlessly suffer and die when we have it within our means to not?
For another, ethical concerns aside, we as a society have a vested interest in making sure that our population is a healthy and productive one. If some members of it aren't, we should do what we can—for the sake of ourselves, if for no other reason, since we also benefit from their future productivity—to ensure that they have a chance to become so again.
Now, I know what you're thinking, that everyone on welfare and other government programs are leeches sucking off the teat of our hard-earned pay. And yes, there are a few people out there like that. But as weird as it may seem, the vast majority of people on government programs don't want to be. They'd love to be in the middle class, or even wealthy.
The problem is that most of these people either 1) don't know how to do so, or 2) have gotten so depressed with a society that systematically prevents them from making more of themselves because everyone is so damned greedy that they figure it's not worth their time and effort. They figure that they'll just end up right where they are now, just shorter of breath and one day closer to death. What's sad is that we as a country used to not be so much this way, but that these people are for the most part correct now.
Do I think that government is doing a spectacular job of helping people to help themselves? No, because it's become rather corrupt with greedy bastards who don't really care about you or me and just want to enjoy the lavish lifestyle of a Congressman. But do I think that one of the reasons government exists is to provide for the general welfare of society by doing things like providing assistance to those who need it? Yes, I most wholeheartedly do.