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New York State Budget Relies On Entertainment Tax
einer writes "Facing a budget shortfall, New York State Governor David Paterson crafts a budget that taxes iPod music downloads and other 'digitally delivered entertainment services.' On the chopping block is $700 million in school aid and $3.5 billion in health care subsidies."
"Let's propose tax cuts where it'll hurt em so they'll favor our new tax."
Whale
Rather than arguing for or against taxing non-tangible products, let me says this...
How is New York's tax system done? Isn't it income tax, property tax, and some sort of sales tax?
They have a sales tax, right? They're just extending it to non-tangible goods. How is downloaded music any different from buying a CD, in regards to taxes? Why shouldn't it be taxed?
Taxi rides, movie tickets, cable and satellite TV, seem like a bad idea to be taxed. Taxi rides are a big part in living in the city, right? Movie tickets are expensive enough already, right? And, well, cable and satellite TV, what effect will that have on people voting for him next time around?
So the state is collapsing under its government's regulations, and the government's plan to solve the problem is to regulate further, driving more markets out of the region? Brilliant! Eventually they'll learn, or be forced to learn, that you can't have your cake and eat it too. They will have to downsize the state government and withdraw the regulations hindering the market, or they will see their economy disappear. One or the other will be the inevitable outcome.
I would rather have less government for less money. Did you ever note that politicians always say they'll have to cut the most inflammatory items - police, fire, libraries - first? How about their own salaries next time for starters?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How the Government institutions tell folks that they should be more fiscally responsible while they run up more and more debt. I guess if I had a tax base, I wouldn't be concerned with how much I spent every year either.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
It's more than that. Now Apple (although probably not Amazon since they maintain they have no presence in NY) will have to collect a special tax strictly for NY residents, and pay that tax regularly to the state, and maybe file additional reports at additional expense, and no longer have the nicely uniform 99 cents/download price/image - and that's the effect on just one company alone. Multiply this by every company affected in every new area and the burden is significant.
Of course NY prides itself on being a very liberal state, and Joe Biden has said that paying taxes is a civil duty. Maybe they'll like having this happen to them. If not they can always vote some new people in - oh wait! The election is already over and you're stuck with these clowns for at least the next 2 years.
(If you say why Apple? It's because there are Apple computer stores in NYC giving the state tax people something to get their claws into.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's always the case, say the politicians.
They will lose more votes cutting services just a little bit than by adding another straw to your back, which is to say, cutting funds to people who get money from government.
I can't imagine why businesses are fleeing overseas, with all this bread-and-circuses genius floating around like turds tied to balloons choking things more and more each year.
Even if you think every single law and every single payment level is needed, sooner or later the arteries clog and the heart stops, choked with a hundred balloon angioplasty stents.
The politicians won't grow balls, so you have to grow them for 'em.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I recently read that New York City's entitlements policy, bloated "public service" sector, fiscal irresponsibility and system of governance were key in bringing on the bankruptcy of the 70s.
Could this be a case of the tree not falling far from the apple?
The remedies in the 70s included fiscal conservatism, cutting entitlements, dealing with corruption and going after crime.
Rather than raising taxes to enable business-as-usual to continue unabated, maybe it's time state officials considered wielding the same scalpel used in the past to the body of the state today.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Take Massachusetts. They had a chance to get rid of the state income tax. They voted agianst it by a 70-30 margin. State unions and pensions that go with it are out of control. the roads and bridges despite all the taxes are crap. I believe its 80% of highway funds go to administrative costs vs 20% goes into fixing the roads. Oh and for that they get a hole in the ground that was so shodily made its killed people, and it only cost them billions to build.
It seems all the gov run agencys are bankrupt yet you have firemen getting full untaxed disability for fake injurys. One of them was caught becuase well he finished in top 3 of some major state bodybuilding competition. Come on yes physical therapy can get a guy fit, but it you have a bum back no amount of therapys going to get you that buff.
The problem is they all get away from it up here in NH and bring the politics that turned everything that way with them. Cash is king now. More people riding the cart then pulling.
Keep the health care budget intact, but close the bases and scale everything down. This will reduce the need to Federal Income Tax revenue.
Then, let NY keep more than $0.66 of every dollar it contributes in Federal taxes.
We need to cut costs, but at the top where the rich benefit from gov't spending the most.
Blar.
The US has on of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, so businesses move overseas to avoid that. If we lower the rates, the businesses would probably come back here, and those tax rates would actually start generating some revenue, rather than forcing business overseas and producing no revenue.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Those losers being states that take in more federal tax money than they contribute. New York gives up 1/3 of it's tax revenue to states like MS,MO,AL,LA,WV,NC,SC, etc...You know, the 'conservative' states where 'small government' and 'less taxes' get a huge response.
Imagine if the Federal Government let New York keep that money in state...instant balanced budget and then some.
Blar.
bleeding money. Interesting. Let's say you had a gaping leg wound that was bleeding, well, blood. For this analogy, assume you're a hemophiliac and the bleeding won't stop on it's own accord. Would you get some blood packs and inject them into your arm? No, you'd stop the bleeding (and inject blood if needed). Raising taxes doesn't stop the bleeding; cutting spending does.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You can't drink water or juice? You're actually claiming that you are forced to drink regular soda. You somehow suffer without it. Seriously?
Developers: We can use your help.
Of course NYC prides itself on being a very liberal state, and Joe Biden has said that paying taxes is a civil duty.
Fixed that for ya. Talk to anyone outside the NYC area and they'll agree that taxes are way too high. The worst part is that local tax monies are sucked up and re-distributed to NYC.
Something tells me that you aren't in favor of a 18% tax on the things you like.
NYS has been driving out businesses just by their costs and taxes. You pay taxes for everything and every piece of paper (permit, license, ...) from the government costs at least $10 for individuals, $100 for businesses. It's so bad that you can live in NYC but any decent company (datacenters. stocks and banking) is right outside the border in NJ. The same goes for Buffalo: it used to be a big business city; they all moved to Erie, PA or Canada and now that city is as good as dead. If you look at the border-towns (eg. PA-border) the NY-side of the border has the smallest population, no businesses except for a bar and no real-estate market (people dump it way below market value). On the other side of the border (the PA-side) there is a decent sized rural town, the shopping mall and stores like Wal-Mart are literally 1/2 mile away from the border, clearly built at a location to draw out the NYS folk.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That's not bad. And it would be heavily progressive - if not because poor people make fewer transactions, then because most poor people are going to demand cash if it saves them 0.5%.
My "unintended consequences" spidey sense is tingling, though...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I do. It reduces medical insurance costs for everyone in the long run
Except the governor is also proposing a tax increase on health insurance too (plus auto insurance, homeowners insurance, etc). Let's drive more people off of private insurance! That'll solve all of our problems.
NY is second in per capita expenditures in the country and nearly double that of California. I've watched the state rot around me for the past 30 years. NYC was relatively immune to it since it is the financial capital of the US, but the other 95% of the state has long suffered under these types of policies. Upstate and Western NY have had a fleeing population, increasing welfare rolls and businesses looking to relocate for decades because of our wasteful spending and burdensome taxation and regulation.
Squeezing even further will just force more activity out of the state, even if people choose to still live here. Fireworks are illegal in NY, but as soon as you cross the border to PA on 15, you'll see the fireworks store. Every summer, you see hundreds of people in my tiny town setting off fireworks. Just how do you think they got them? Almost all of the population of NY is within a 2 hour drive to another state. Buy stuff in sufficient quantities and it becomes worth it to make a trip, especially if you're already going to visit friends and family in adjacent states. The suckers dumb enough to keep buying in NY will pay the extra tax and the rest of us will be boosting the economies of PA, NJ, VT, CT, etc instead of our home state.
NY needs to cut some of the sacred cows... plain and simple. That's the only way of resolving the crisis.
Stop Koolaid Politics
We have socialized healthcare - Medicare - which pays a huge chunk of our hospital bills. That's why some American politicians get the "bright" idea to tax hamburgers to discourage bad health risks & lower Medicare costs.
Me, I prefer Thomas Jefferson's view:
(updated to the modern age): "Whether my neighbor eats one hamburger, many hamburgers, or no hamburgers, matters not to me. His actions do not harm my body, my property, nor my rights, so I will allow my neighbor to eat or not eat as many burgers as he pleases." - That is the true meaning of individual liberty. Do whatever you damn well please, and respect others' rights to do the same, so long as they do not harm your body, property, or rights.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I assumed their city was completely running off of Parking/Traffic Enforcement, and that everything else was just to pay off the corruption.
Try parking legally in New York City. Am I right people?
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Does anyone else get the idea that this has happened before? These type of taxes just seem so familiar.
And there are. But you should stop listening when someone attempts to argue that they'll raise corporate tax in lieu of income tax and that that will benefit you the individual.
Corporate taxes are paid by you, the individual, in the form of increased prices for goods and services. For a corporation a tax is just like any other cost. Labor or utilities or copper. The primary difference between tax and most other costs is that aside from the above loopholes there is little incentive to compete with other businesses to reduce tax, or to innovate, or to be more efficient than the next guy.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Your post, and the parent post are choking on their own misinformation.
The US has on of the highest corporate tax rates in the world
If you want to pick a *single* statistic, to tie your frustrations to, then that's about as bad as it gets.
I think we would all agree that the American economy remains one of the most vibrant in the world. It remains one of the most business friendly. http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/10/smallbusiness/best_countries_for_small_biz.smb/
8 years of explicitly promoting a lax regulatory environment for every category of business in the U.S. hasn't seemed to have helped keep jobs in the U.S. at all. Wages certainly haven't gone up for those making less than $50,000/yr in the last eight years.
So let's chop away at those taxes! Publicly funded law enforcement is overrated. Organized crime/gangs do a good job protecting the neighborhood. Courts? Jails? Don't need em. Let's get rid of utility regulation too! You are perfectly willing to pay way more for electricity or safe fresh water at monopoly prices?
It's time you came to the realization that taxes are a part of what makes living in this country great.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Consitiutional Amendments
"No governement agency at the federal, state, or local level shall spend in excess of the previous 3 years average of income from taxes and fees collected except through a voter approved bonding" (Prevent Overspending)
"No person shall have their property tax increased beyond 3% in any calendar year, nor increased greater then 100% since the time of purchase or transfer of ownership of their primary residence by any goverment agency." (Prevent trying to steal and redistributed land through taxing people out of their homes)
"A person shall be secure in their private property and eminent domain shall be restricted for use solely for the appropriation for government owned and operated use and may not be transfered to private ownership."
(Clean up 'public use' for land stealing)
"No company shall be tax on profits in excess of 5% of net revenue by the federal government and taxed no more then 15% when combined with local and state taxes." (Limit corporate income tax, so states at most can tax corporate income at 10%)
"The pay of corporate officers of a publically traded company shall be a scale of the median salary paid by the company to it's employees and contractors and may not exceed 10 times the median salary of the company in salary and no more then 20 times the median salary in stock compensation at the time of aquisition of those stock options." (If the typical employee makes $40,000 a year then the CEO can never make more then $400,000 in a salary and cannot receive more then $800,000 is stock in a year. If they want a raise, most employees must get a raise also)
"The term of any senate or house member shall be limited to 2 terms"
Those would go a long way.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
State funds are our property. If those funds are spent on health care, and your neighbor does things which burden the health care system more than others, than he is doing harm to your property by effectively taking it from you.
Developers: We can use your help.
Or you could just buy some itunes giftcards which have song credits.
Since there is no tax on the purchases now and this would require new legislation so the tax could be any amount. Your $.99 download could be taxed $.51 suddenly making your songs cost $1.50 each and erasing almost any hope you'll buy online.
The thing that bothers me most about the inflammatory language used by the politicians regarding the urgency of the issue and the hot-button programs they say they have to cut to make the budget balance. In my home town of Mesa, AZ the idiot mayor and most of council were saying the budget was a mess, all these bonds were coming due, roads needed fixing and we had to close the libraries and lay off lots of police and fire personnel to balance the budget. One council member was level headed and came up with a budget that balanced the budget (or nearly so) and only cut non-essential services such as after school art programs and the funny one... slicing the monthly cell phone stipend for the council members from $3,000 to $500, over $200K in savings for the year. The council voted strongly against the centrist, level headed plan and the alarmist budget went to a public vote. Since this was all televised as a "town meeting" and many people saw that there was no 'need' to cut police and library personnel the majority budget was soundly defeated.
To this day I think the mayor and council sill get an obscene allowance for cell phone and car usage.
The biggest idiocy was that most of the council claimed the city didn't know the bonds from 14 years ago were coming due. How stupid or willfully ignorant do you have to be to not know that your budget needs to account for several million dollars of debt service?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
So because people on the right like it, that reason alone makes everyone else dislike it? sounds like ideological jealousy (because they couldn't figure it out) or just elitism claiming they know whats better for the people, so we are going to take everything from you and hand it out as we see fit.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Further I think this opens up another issue... those who pirate materials could be tried for tax evasion. Exactly how they nailed Al Capone. They couldn't get him on other things, but they could get him on that. I was always under the impression that taxes are paid based on the geographic location of the point of sale.
Um... counter-point time.
Funny, that. I'm a "lifelong Californian and middle-aged guy" and I disagree with you. Not about the "immigrants" part, but your leaving out the fact that we aren't talking about "immigrants" (my wife is one -- most of her family and my grandparents). It's the ones working here against the law, oversaying visas, working under fake SSNs, etc, etc, etc that are realling causing problems.
That California is yet again on the brink of bankruptcy is due in no small part to the costs generated by our unregulated under-the-table importation of poverty. What about state healthcare? Emergency rooms are closing in droves. Why? Our roads are overused, housing over priced and the tax burden shifts more and more upon the middle and upper classes and businesses to keep just the infrastructure running. Businesses are leaving the cities... and the state. The "rich/upper" income tax bracket STARTS at $44k paying nearly 10%. Know any "rich" people who make under $50k? Certainly not if they plan to live in California...
No, I'm just saying the nutters wreck it for the rest of us. People (rightfully) filter out whatever the extreme right is screaming about, just like they (rightfully) filter out everything the extreme left is ranting about. It's just a shame that some good ideas get lost in the crossfire, on either side.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
That's a bit simplistic, isn't it?
What if the tax money was being used to torture puppies? Would it be okay to evade that? What if it was some other thing you find highly morally objectionable? Be it blowing up some country you have no quarrel with or doing embryonic stem cell research. (I understand that the electorate is generally divided into either-or camps on those two topics, but I think both are a bad idea.)
I understand that NY isn't doing any of these things, but there's always something.
The fundamental reason that I believe that taxes (and corresponding spending) should be absolutely minimal is that it forces people to fund things they may find morally objectionable under threat of loss of liberty. I think liberty should trump having our personal needs met by the state.
-Peter
You can't drink water or juice? You're actually claiming that you are forced to drink regular soda. You somehow suffer without it. Seriously?
Yes, seriously.
Pick something that you consume a lot more of than the majority of the population (high-speed internet...we'll tax you on each byte transferred, etc.), and replace that with "regular soda" in your argument.
Once enough people stop drinking sugared beverages, then the government will have to put a tax on the "diet" ones to make up for the tax shortfall. Taxing non-diet soda is just another "what 'for the good of the children/fat people/whatever' reason can we use to get more tax money?" plan.
Basically, you try to convince all the people who "won't be impacted by the tax" to vote for it (or to vote for the representatives who implemented it). Then, you can get all the people impacted by this tax to vote for the "diet soda tax", because it will even things out.
It's the ones working here against the law, oversaying visas, working under fake SSNs, etc, etc, etc that are realling causing problems.
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but they provide most of the hard labor in the hospitality industry. Having worked in it, I know this from experience.
What problems do they cause?
That California is yet again on the brink of bankruptcy
And how exactly can you pin *$25+ billion* of dollars of fiscal irresponsibility on a significant minority? Do these illegal aliens spend hundreds of billions of dollars every single year on their own somehow?
unregulated under-the-table importation of poverty.
Okay, from this day forward, all restaraunts, hotels, service shops, farms, warehouses, drivers, are magically forbidden from using undocumented workers. Not only would there be a supply crisis, but you won't be able to afford going to your local restaurant or hotel. The cost of produce alone would skyrocket.
Emergency rooms are closing in droves
If you asked the people that run the hospitals, they would tell you the State isn't paying them enough to keep the doors open. They would also tell you that the emergency rooms are overwhelmed with people who can't afford to go to a doctor for non-emergency service. These are actual citizens using public services because they can't afford any other medical care.
tax burden shifts more and more upon the middle and upper classes
Okay, lets tax the hell out of the poor. Guess what? They'll leave the State too!
Your thinking is unclear and riddled with xenophobia.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I wonder why these politicians (New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland - they are all in trouble) never had the idea to "lay off 75% of the government staff who are doing nothing but surfing the net" and "cut spending"?
It's as if the don't know how to do what every American family does every day - pinch pennies & cut spending.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Your argument is that a corporation selling Product X for $8.99 will raise the price to $9.99 if their taxes go up, and the customer will happily pay that price. So why exactly doesn't said corporation sell Product X for $9.99 *now* if that's the price that customers are willing to pay?
What if the tax money was being used to torture puppies? Would it be okay to evade that?
Apparently not. Part of my tax money is used to kill babies, but I still have to pay it. I'm sure that tax money is used for a lot of things that we disagree with, but we are still required to pay them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
There, fixed that for you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand You can't become rich selling a single apple for a 10 billion $ because nobody is going to buy it.
Assuming a classic demand curve an increased sales tax will drive down demand, but the customers that are left care less about price so the price you charge to maximize profit goes up more than the sales tax. However, with a tax on profits the price that maximizes profits does not change because there is no change to the demand curve or your costs. Basically, if you would have made more money charging more you would have already done so and if you would have made more money charging less you would have done so independent of the tax on profits.
PS: The real impact is on investing which can impact long term pricing as well as the amount of tax evasion.
This is the REAL conflict in America.
It isn't Republicans versus Democrats. It's city versus countryside, and it's been going on since 1989. Most people in the country (and suburbs) want minimal taxation and government to "butt out" of their affairs. Meanwhile city folk what free handouts like subways, hospitals, new baseball stadiums - they want to be treated like children being cared for by daddy government.
Country - independent
City - dependent
That's what almost all politics in America boils down to.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.