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Mississippi Bill Would Tax Software Sales
Byzantine writes "The Mississippi Legislature has passed MS House Bill 1461 which would amend the state's tax laws specifically to charge sales tax on 'electrically transferred digital products,' including products bought via mail-order. The bill is currently on the governor's desk awaiting signature." Softpedia claims that 20 states have enacted download taxes of one sort or another — most of them for iTunes music — and that New York is considering taxing downloads of all kinds.
I live in Canada. Here, all of these products are taxed like any other good or service - and there is no mail order freebie to distory the level playing field of the retail economy by not having to pay them via mial order. Up here? It's not new. It's not shocking. Believe it or not, the sun still comes up every morning - the world turns. Then it gets dark and we go to sleep. Every day. Life goes on.
Thing is, the federal debt in the USA has been spiralling so fast since 2000 that all of these "reports" and pointing to same as the portents of the Four Horsemen are going to go the way of the dodo in a dozen years or so - or less.
You simply will not have a *choice* but to increase taxes in the USA to at least Canadian and possibly Western European levels if you don't deal with it soon enough. (My bet - you won't deal with it soon enough. Americans are nutty when it comes to taxes.) You'll put it off and put it off and then put it off somemore until there is no wiggle room left at all. And then you will point fingers at your politicians - instead of you the voters - which is *precisely* where the blame will lie.
That's the price you will ultimately have to pay for spending money for decades that you simply do not have. That prediction is not a *maybe*. It is a *certainty*. The cheque is coming to your table. Deal with it (and kindly quit your whining about it too, please. It's not a big deal.)
.Robert
Because there's no "value added" by introducing a Value Added Tax.
Why should a business transaction be taxed simply because it happened? Taxes are meant to give the government the bare minimum of income necessary to conduct government business, not to punish people for spending money they received in exchange for their labor.
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I recently came to California from New Hampshire, which introduced a property tax several years ago. I wasn't around for Prop. 13, but after doing a bit of reading, I'm glad it passed. If someone owns land, and has little income, why should they be punished for that?
I know a man who works as a teacher in New Hampshire who owns over 100 acres of land. The land's been in his family for at least two generations. The property tax was passed, and he nearly went bankrupt paying the taxes on the land because the land value assessments were artificially inflated by the housing market bubble.
I don't like heavy taxation in any form, but property taxes are disproportionately unfair to anyone who owns land and doesn't have a high income.
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Who the hell is "Mississippi Bill" and why does he care about software sales? He should probably devote more of his time to planning his upcoming battles with Minnesota Fats and the Cincinnati Kid.
If there's no incentive for people to make productive use of capital, the economy stagnates.
The incentive for people to make productive use of capital is the reward / gain they get from doing so. I'm no rabid objectivist or "big-L" libertarian, but that's just fundamental economics.
it's not fair to society to let him keep it for no/low cost when it might be put to better, more productive use for society by someone else.
Spoken like a true communist. Other than life itself, there is no more fundamental right than the right to property. From your comments I get the impression that you are not a property owner or you would not be so cavalier in taxing it away.
Reallocating property from one person to another based on "productive use of capital" for the benefit of society over the rights of the individual is always going to be a negative incentive to productivity. Why acquire property if it can just be taken away (or taxed away) at the whim of some powerful individual or group? Some property taxes are probably inevitable to pay for necessary social services (fire, police, etc.) but those taxes should never be used to penalize for some imagined lack of relative "productivity".
Unfortunately, there are others who agree with your line of reasoning, most notably some US Supreme Court justices. See Kelo v. City of New London for a real world example of the results.