California Lawmaker Proposes Music Download Tax

modemac writes "Sacramento, California Assemblyman Charles Calderon wants to expand a 75-year-old sales tax on 'tangible personal property' to include music downloads from iTunes and other music-download sites. The tax would specifically apply to music downloads, but the estimate used in this article for revenue generated by 'Net downloading also "includes pornography downloads." The measure, AB 1956, will be considered on Monday, April 14th."

Comments

Re:Tangible Personal Property?

[esocid]

That is the point of the bill this guy is proposing. He wants to update it from tangible to include information.

"The notion of taxing tangible, physical property is really an industrial-era construct when we made widgets and sold widgets," Calderon said Friday. "Now it's not about widgets, it's about information, and selling information and moving information."

So to sum it up, he wants to tax information.

Tough for California to say no...

[tjstork]

California is facing some enormous budget shortfalls and the Democratic controlled state legislature simply will not cut state spending. Arnold (by no means a hard right winger), tried to cut spending but met with a hailstorm of resistance in a state whose politics are dominated by powerful unions.

Democrats in California have already been arguing for a tax increase, and in that environment, saying that sales taxes have to be paid on internet items might be politically the easiest thing for them to do. After all, they could argue, somewhat disingenously - why should everyone else pay taxes, but internet businesses not?

Common everywhere else

[ebcdic]

There seems to be a view in America that for some reason online sale of non-physical products can't be taxed in the same way as other sales, either because it's wrong in some way or impossible to police. And yet in the rest of the world it's common - in Europe you have to pay VAT on iTunes purchases just as you do on everything else.