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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."
Simple solution if you think this is unjust highway robbery targeting the technically gifted: Find a friend or family living in a different state and get their address. Call your credit card company and add their name and address to a billable location for your credit card. Then when you set up your credit card information on iTunes or Amazon or whatever, list their address as the billing address. They can't apply the tax even if you are downloading in NY.
My work here is dung.
"Let's propose tax cuts where it'll hurt em so they'll favor our new tax."
Whale
Well, on the up side he's trying to raise more money through products rather than income taxes. I'd prefer the taxes on ipods, cigars, gasoline, and luxury cars to income tax increases. Of course if it hurts NY businesses (I don't think it will), then it'll hurt in the long run. But the state needs to stop bleeding money immediately.
Developers: We can use your help.
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?
http://www.apttax.com/
That is all. Oh, and it's time for all government to tighten its fat belt.
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.
Not with the taxing entertainment, but I'm really not too upset about that one. But the rest of the country needs to back off on the social programs. Schools, no. Trying to pay for EVERYTHING to make sure EVERY warm body (citizen or not) has the same benefits as everyone else just isn't sustainable. Go ahead, tax the rich. And, as in the case of NYC, they are moving out in droves. So that leaves you with masses of people dependant on welfare, and no more rich left to tax.
California is going to be next here. They have a massive immigration issue. It's one thing to turn a blind eye (sanctuary cities anyone?) to the problem, Its another to try to feed, cloth, house, and healthcare every single person that shows up on your doorstep.
As Spock said, "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." The many are the 300Million United States Citizens, the few are the 20M illegal immigrants
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Politicians will tax everything they can lay their hands on:
- telephone
- cellphone
- cable
- ISP
- electricity/natural gas
- gasoline/road tax
- income tax
- social security/medicare (levied on both citizens and businesses)
- sales
- excise/manufacturing tax
- tariff/import tax
It was obvious internet downloads would eventually get taxed too. The average American pays 40% of their income in taxes. The average European 65-70%.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I have two good friends who are retired school psychologists from New York ad everytme I read about New York's financial problems, I think of them.
Same thing in California: two relatives are teachers, and one is just about to retire on a teachers pension. I think that California is very close to bankruptcy.
Pensions may sound good, but it may be that only federal government pensions may pay out because the federal government can print money ad pay out in highly devalued dollars).
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.
I'd say that these tax proposals are extremely short-sighted and show that our (un-elected) Governor lacks a vision or direction, but I wouldn't want to offend anyone
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.
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.
Legalise marijuana and tax it at $100 per ounce. Between the new tax revenue and the savings in less police and prison space we'll make $50 billion per year.
Legalize marijuana and tax it at $100 per ounce. Between the new tax revenue and loads of pot smokers, almost no one will CARE about the high taxes in New York.
There, FIXED that for you.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
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
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
"...will have to collect a special tax strictly for NY residents."
Cell phone companies have had to deal with special local taxes for years. Any company that delivers products and has to collect sales tax has to deal with differences in local sales tax.
The tax system in the US seems to be more about subterfuge and camouflage than any sound fiscal policy.
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
Sales tax discourages consumption, and instead encourages saving money.
Yeah it has that effect, but only for the people who have money to save in the first place. A sales tax is usually considered regressive because the poor spend a higher percentage of their income than the rich. If the sales tax were 10%, and I make $20,000 a year, and spend all of it, I pay 10% of my income in taxes. If you make $200,000 a year, but only spend half of it on taxable items. The rest goes to investments, and savings. You only pay 5% in taxes. It doesn't seem quite fair.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
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? ]=-
Movie tickets, taxi rides, soda, beer, wine, cigars and massages would be taxed under Paterson's proposal. It also extends sales taxes to cable and satellite TV services and removes the tax exemption for clothes costing less than $110...reinstating the sales tax on clothing and shoes will drive people to New Jersey, where they will also gas up their cars and pick up their wine, spirits and soda because the prices are less due to lower taxes.
Seriously.. taxing clothes under $110..... First off, I think they should tax the hell out of anyone who wants to spend $100 or more per item (obviously some larger items can be excluded) but don't tax the guy spending $20 on a pair of jeans from walmart. Tax those who can afford the 100+ pair of jeans...
And as for TV.. well, I know its not a necessity, but it does keep people occupied, and we are already unfee fee'd to death there, adding another tax, well then they better start making the cable/sat companies remove some of those unfee's that they have been milking for years.....
Or even better, the gov should make those unfee fee's actual gov taxers and use that money, the telco's/cable/sat/cell providers are not actually using the money for anything that they are supposed to (that $1 charge for number portability that was supposed to be temporary and go away after they recouped their costs to implement the infrastructure.... has long long since been done, and now the money is basically profit...)..
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
The US has on of the highest corporate tax rates in the world
Hogwash. This table shows otherwise. Unless you think every business in the U.S. is taxed at 35%, the U.S. corporate tax rate is somewhere in the middle to lower end of the scale. And that does not include VAT.
What you did was take the combined corporate tax rate in the U.S., not the range of taxes corporations pay.
Further, using The Tax Foundation's figure of combined rates (which is what you're using), they use the example of Sweden who has a lower combined corporate tax rate than the U.S. That's nice, except they fail to mention that in Sweden, if you use the combined personal income tax, the top rate is 60%. Way above anything we in the U.S. pay. Even the uber rich.
Corporations leaving the U.S. has very little to do with corporate tax rates. The biggest reason for relocating overseas is cheaper labor. There are very few Americans who want to work in a factory for $8/hour putting widgets together. If there were, food processors wouldn't be hiring illegal immigrants in droves.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Lost his marbles? Please - He's the only responsible one up there in Albany!
The state has a 12 billion dollar shortfall - and NY State is not the federal government - it can't print money to get out of it. This is all because Pataki, Spitzer, and the other previous idiots running this state kept thinking the good times would be around forever, and passed spending programs that reflected it. Well now they're gone, and its about time an actual adult took responsibility and proposed serious ways of closing the gap.
Patterson is proposing both service cuts across the board, and tax increases - not to mention cutting benefits for state employees. Meanwhile the state senate and the assembly blubber about nickle-and-dime crap. Personally, I think we should cut every new program added in the past 8 years, and see how much of the gap that closes.
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
You need to look at the effect of past luxury taxes."BR" They do things like put the people who work on boats planes and sports cars out of business.
With a net loss in tax revenue.
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)
It's a tax on profit so it's not a cost. If your costs go up you need to increase the cost, but if your price maximizes your profit then a change in the tax rate on profits will not change the price you charge because that would reduce your profit.
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?
The Feds tried that a few years ago. They slapped a luxury tax on yachts.
The luxury tax did not bring in a single penny of tax revenues. The people who would have paid it noticed that the price on domestic yacht purchases had gone up. Some of them postponed or cancelled their planned purchases. Others went out of jurisdiction, and bought abroad.
The resulting downturn in domestic yacht purchases did, however, put quite a few boatyards out of business, and cause marinas to lay people off, putting those employees on unemployment, costing their States a lot of money, and erasing their tax contributions, to both the Feds and the state (and local) governments.
The luxury tax on yachts, far from bringing home the bacon, actually LOST money, for the Feds, the States, and the people who worked to make and maintain those yachts, and everyone who worked to supply those yacht workers.
part of the problem is that the tax brackets do not reflect the distribution of wealth in our society. we have tax brackets all the way up to ~$350K a year, but then we stop distinguishing between people who make $350K/year and people who make $1M/year and up. this bracket system puts an effective tax cap on the super-rich who possess the bulk of the national wealth.
by creating $1M/year, $2M/year, $4M/year, etc. brackets and introducing a wealth tax on billionaires we could reduce the tax rate among lower income brackets. and by removing the tax cap and introducing a progressive tax system for corporations, that would further decrease the tax burden on the middle and lower classes.
of course, we still won't see any benefit from our tax dollars so long as we keep allowing social programs to be cut and public infrastructure to be neglected. meanwhile, what tax funding is available gets poured into the MIC and corporate bailouts/subsidies. worst of all, Americans seem content to stand by and watch as all this happens, and even letting politicians buy their votes with promises of tax cuts.
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.