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Internet Tax Approved By Louisiana House
Stinky Litter Box writes "WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that the Louisiana House voted 81-9 on Thursday to propose that a '15-cent monthly surcharge should be levied on Internet access across Louisiana to fight online criminal activity.' Can you say 'slippery slope?' The good news is that Gov. Jindal opposes such a tax. Full disclosure: I grew up in south Louisiana and worked for WWL-TV in the late '70s."
Rep. Mack "Bodi" White, R-Denham Springs, said he sponsored the bill for Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, to raise money to finance a division in Caldwell's office that investigates Internet crimes, particularly online sex crimes against children.
I agree that sex crime against children are very very bad but I think that if you look at the scope and size of the problems that plague the internet and ranked them in order, you'd find many other things precede sex crimes against children. Like Internet Fraud and Identity Theft. How much money do people lose to things like that? Hint: A lot.
I'm sick and tired of thinking of the children, let's think about everybody for a while. The lil' bastards don't even pay taxes and they're the motivation behind 50% of the legislation in this country.
My work here is dung.
Thank goodness legislatures have the discipline to only use funds for the reason they gave in the justification.
I don't live in Louisiana (or the US), but I'd be quite cross if they started charging me because other people like to watch images of naked kids.
What do you think 15 cents is when it is misappropriated and charged to an entire state/abused/shown to not have matched the original intent at all?
answer: a whole lot of money going nowhere. See FEMA, many useless taxes in general, etc.
Really, 15 cents sounds like small amounts, but so did the original 3% or whatever for taxing gasoline. Now about 1/4 of gasoline cost is tax. How's that working out? Money well spent?
Bring up an emotionally charged topic like children's protection and you can enact any half-baked political action. They killed Socrates this way, they can sure as hell ratchet down internet rights this way.
mmmm...forbidden donut
Look at all the surcharges you pay on your telephone bill. I think the federal rural phone tax lasted until something like 1999?
This is a non-story. The big story where states are going to soak people for taxes is when Congress allows them to do sales tax on every single purchase. It's coming.
(and maybe a federal one, too)
Of course it's tough to vote against "protecting the children," but if this expenditure is necessary it should take a place in line with every other legitimate need and wait for its share of the income tax. Special interests are going to be lined up around the block to try this one in La.
I tend to agree with you there, there are so many more prominent situations across the board we could defer our resources to, however, children should not be completely put off to the side, everything is parallel, so to is the p0rn on the web...if you turn away for 2 seconds you fall so far behind playing catch up, you won't be able to catch them properly for another few years after you start again....
I believe there should be an overall committee, which has 3 sub division, fraud/identity theft, child p0rn, and virus/worm/spam divisions. These would each have there own budgets decreed by higher up management, and also
correlating to their importance to one another, but sharing tactics and technologies to better make use of resources.
Also, just because we spend 1 billion dollars on child p0rn to catch those implicated, does not mean we will get more caught, it just means the chances should be greater. It all depends on how the money is spent and where, I think before giving any more money to any of these organizations, we should see where they will spend the money , sort of like a business plan, open for review by a few high class security experts, that can see the big picture....sometimes a lot of the people in these orgs, don't really know the firs thing about technology advances, even though they mean well.
No, you left out the fact that you're going downhill to get 50 mpg with the Impala.
HOW did they explain the whole concept of slavery for the... 10,000 years BEFORE Darwin then?
Perhaps because much of the history of slavery has not been race based. People have been sold as slaves for debt, and slaves have often been a prize of war, those wars often being fought over political boundaries rather than racial differences.
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