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NSA Data Center the Focus of Tax Controversy
Nerval's Lobster writes "Location is everything when choosing the site of a data center. Firms such as Microsoft and Google and Facebook spend a lot of time looking into the costs of land, power, regulation and taxes before placing their respective data centers in a particular place. Sometimes, that local tax bill comes into play in a big way. Just ask the National Security Agency which learned it faces a multimillion-dollar annual state tax on the power consumed by its new data center in Camp Williams, south of Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake Tribune obtained a series of email exchanges between the feds and the state, with the NSA protesting a $2.4 million tax on its annual power expenditure, pegged at about $40 million. Harvey Davis, director of installations and logistics for the NSA, sent a letter (subsequently quoted by the newspaper) to state officials that made the logistics argument: 'Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5bn construction at Camp Williams. HP325 [the new law] runs counter to what we expected.'"
This would be the data center William Binney et al claim is logging almost all domestic communication.
A *small* private company maybe. I think a company like GOOG or MSFT can make sure the appropriate wheels are greased.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Actually, that's slightly incorrect. After reading through the articles a bit more, Utah specifically said they can't tax the federal government. So what they're doing is taxing the power company the additional 6% so that the power company can pass on the additional costs to the NSA, effectively taxing the NSA an additional 6%.
(Where do you think the Federal government gets its money?)
They borrow it from China.
"We don’t tax the federal government," Mayfield explained to a Utah Senate committee March 7. "So what this bill does is tax Rocky Mountain Power and then gives them the ability to pass that on as an increase in their energy bills. So we collect an equivalent of what would have been a tax on the federal government."
"We don’t tax the federal government," Mayfield explained to a Utah Senate committee March 7. "So what this bill does is tax Rocky Mountain Power and then gives them the ability to pass that on as an increase in their energy bills. So we collect an equivalent of what would have been a tax on the federal government."
yikes! What about poor Mary? She gets nothing?
(Where do you think the Federal government gets its money?)
They borrow it from China.
The US debt is about US$ 16.7T right now: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current
China owns about $1.25T of that: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt
That's about 7.5%. The next largest foreign owner is Japan, which owns $1.1T (6.6%).
The largest single holder is the US Social Security Trust Fund, with the Fed also owning about $2T currently thanks to their quantitative easing activities.
It's become of a bit of an urban legend: yes, China holds a good chunk, but not as much as people think.
So, the government is going to have to write the government a check?
Yikes.
Why is this surprising? Government is not one, homogeneous thing. Here we have a state government indirectly trying to tax an agency of the federal government.
Again, why is this surprising? Look at any corporation of sufficiently large size. Such a corporation would be divided into either departments or business units (each with their own specific budgets). When one renders a service to another, or when two or more need to engage into some type of cross-organizational project, they need to decide how to fund them from their budgets. And if one causes costs to run higher than a certain cap, that one unit has to compensate the others' budgets from its own.
A more tangible scenario in IT is when IT is its own department with its own budget and its own infrastructure. Other departments deploy their systems with them with some specific SLA agreements. Such SLA agreements typically include IT to pay a penalty (from its annual budget) to the other departments whenever that department(s) experience a downtime during core hours (because those "core hours" down times cause said departments to bleed money in terms of lost transactions, idle employee/users time, etc.)
Large organizations (public or otherwise) do not have a universal budgel like a cookie jar where everyone puts his hands on. Budgets get allocated per department or business unit, with money flowing among them when rendering a service or paying a penalty for loss of service.
They can't tax the federal government. So they decided to create a law that allows for a loophole that taxes the power company and the law also allows the power company to pass the additional costs on to the federal government
I am sooooo OK with this. Seems like just deserts for all the times the fed has collected taxes and then held those funds hostage in order to force the states to pass laws like speed limits.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.