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Japan To Tax Online Sales Of Foreign-Made Content
Qedward writes with this except from CIO. "Japan is planning to tax sales of foreign online content such as e-books, apps and downloaded music by late 2015. Japanese who purchase electronic content from foreign firms like Amazon.com through overseas servers don't have to pay consumption tax, currently at 5% but slated to rise to 8% in April. That has made foreign content cheaper than apps, MP3 downloads, software, and e-books distributed domestically. Physical products purchased from abroad are hit with consumption tax when they clear customs in Japan, but no such levy exists for online goods. The government plans to close the loophole and make foreign vendors selling consumer goods register with tax authorities and pay the tax. Japanese corporations that buy foreign electronic content such as business software, however, will have to pay the tax directly to the Japanese tax authorities, Nikkei Asian Review reported this morning."
I know for a fact there's a Japanese edition of /.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Same as most other governments do, make the onus of reporting on you, and failure to report illegal.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How the hell are they going to police that?
They don't need to perfectly police it. The largest 10% of vendors sell 90% of the goods. As long as you collect from Amazon, iTunes, GooglePlay, and so on, you will get all the revenue.
The funny part is that this actually gives a competitive advantage to small stores to little to notice. Until they become big enough to be noticed...
Well, Japan *does* still manufacture stuff, unlike the U.S. Maybe forcing people to buy locally isn't an unwanted outcome.
The U.S., to my knowledge, is the only country that kowtows to the corporate to the degree that they don't even try to promote local manufacturing anymore. There is nothing wrong with protecting your country and its livelihood... it's one of the things governments are SUPPOSED to do.
The reason consumers are buying digital merch from other countries is because it is cheaper. Entertainment moguls have an even tighter stranglehold on Japan's entertainment business and pricing than even the RIAA in the US and prices for music, movies, games, etc are all much higher, on the order of 50-100% higher. If you try buying a song in the Japan iTunes store for instance, a song that is 99 cents or $1.29 in the US app store is ~$2 in Japan.
So I'm sure what the Japanese people are doing, as an example, is switching their iTunes "home" location to another country and buying iTunes cards from those countries, saving costs and getting equivalent merchandise.
This scheme does not make for easy tracking and taxation on the Japanese side...
What year in the U.S. has the most value of manufactured goods?
Manufacturing jobs have no bearing on amount of manufacturing.
Senator Smoot? Representative Hawley? Is that you?
It would be nice if someone learned a lesson from the last time countries started trying to protect local industries from competition, but the evidence is that they haven't....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Same as most other governments do, make the onus of reporting on you, and failure to report illegal.
No, they'll do as Europe does. Foreign websites that sell to European customers digital goods automatically add VAT in what you pay. The end user has no reporting to do. It is all automatic.
Omly the US had a fucked up volontary system for reporting due taxes.
What if a seller (legal in it's own country) sells mp3's/videos through a website that allows worldwide customers and takes Bitcoin for it. The seller never registers with the government of Japan. The buyer avoids the tax, the seller saves credit card fees and chargebacks. Only the government of Japan looses.
well.. they make apple and amazon do it for them - or face potential blocking.
paying VAT on such buys is the norm in eu pretty much already.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The same way that the police it in Europe. The money is paid using local credit cards, so they can get the money off the bank before it reaches them if needs be.
You do realize there's an amazon.co.jp, right?
And at the same time, they're paying good money to their workers in Japan.
Are you sure you want to stick with your hypothesis?
We should tax all foreigners not living in our country.
rewriting history since 2109
"Omly the US had a fucked up volontary system for reporting due taxes."
That "fucked up volontary system" is due to the way our country is structured.
States cannot tax transactions that happen in other States. That's because each State is sovereign. So States impose a "use" tax (which actually is not "voluntary") on the use of the item within the State. Because it is not a tax on the transaction, and only involves inside-State use, it is a legal tax.
The Federal government, likewise, has no authority to tax on behalf of States.
That's the way our country is designed. That's the way it's supposed to be. If you don't like it, go somewhere else... don't try to mess up the government of my states and country by imposing what YOU think is a "fair" tax.
This isn't even closely related. Smoot Hawley was principally about exorbitant tariffs imposed upon imported goods. This is about making provisions for the common sales tax to be imposed upon all sales rather than solely domestic sales.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
the harder I work, the more money they want
No, that's not true. An income tax taxes you based on how much you made; whether you worked hard or not in order to make it isn't a factor. In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes.
then tax me again when I ... give it to my children as inheritance when I die
Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous. It's not such a big deal when you leave some modest bank accounts or some furniture or something, but it's not good to have people inherit vast estates merely due to the accident of their birth.
Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I know enough Japanese people to know that a lot of western media is very difficult to come by in Japan via conventional mediums. You'd be surprised at the number of videogames, movies and the likes that are commonplace in the US, Europe, etc, but not in Japan.
Companies like Capcom and Square Enix actually localize some western games in there, with usually tacky, poorly translated scripts, bottom-of-the-barrel voice acting (if any) and overly inflated prices. Most videogame players that like western-style stuff such as FPSs and the likes, usually have to deal with importing. I bet this situation sounds familiar to any fans of Japanese gaming.
Knowing this little, apparently obscure fact, also shows a lot about the gaming tastes in Japan. A lot of them are only exposed to the big stuff like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, that get a lot of publicity, while other classic titles that shaped our gaming culture are practically unheard of except by the most hardcore gamers.
And now they will be punished for liking those already obscure, hard-to-obtain and overpriced games and movies. It sucks to be into anything lately. I am pretty sure someone I know will hate this with a passion, and it might get in the way of our mailing each other "common-here-but-rare-there" stuff.
This seems to exist in Spain already, though. Receiving mail from the US/Japan with multimedia stuff on it (in my case it was multiple separated copies of a regular $25 DVD of a popular show and random stuff without special value or hazard, and one game from also a popular franchise, was a budget edition so it wasn't worth that much) has a mysterious unnamed customs tax of 60â to be paid or your mail was to be "disposed of". I was told by the all the six mailmen that came after this mysterious, unheard of tax appeared, and all said the same thing: It was a thing to discourage importing. However I haven't seen anyone else mention it, although I don't read many forums in Spanish and none of my local acquaintances is into importing, so I can't confirm this is an actual thing. The mailmen seemed annoyed by the extra steps so I don't think they were making it up, though. (and I was of course screaming for paying more in taxes than in the actual content of the mail..., but there isn't really nowhere I found to go complain to, so...I guess I gotta suck it and pay ransom anytime I want to get something unobtainable here. As usual, legit customers suffer more than pirates)
"economic stimulus", AKA "they want more of our money". regular sales tax will be raised from 5% to 8% in april too.
vending machine product prices will change, ill be looking for a riot to join.
any culture other than their own is "junk culture" to many. the japanese govt has initiatives to repel things like hanryuu (korean wave) and make people more interested in japanese culture/content and thus creating a demand for more. hard to do when K-Pop groups are releasing albums in japanese (does that make it J-Pop?) and the fact that japanese tv sucks (not all, but most) to the point that no one overseas would want to watch it even if they could understand it. i know more than a few early-20s girls that are watching 'The Walking Dead' and are more interested in reruns of 'Dr House' than the new (second) season of 'Doctor X'
Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous...
Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.
Citation? Or are these just your opinions based on YOUR interpretation of "fairness"?
~~
No, they're widespread opinions. Laws usually come about because people think they're good ideas; why would legislators work to enact laws that everyone except for me was opposed to?
People who inherit wealth didn't work for it, and didn't earn it. Some heirs might be in a desperate way, and it isn't bad to help them get on their feet. Others might inherit items of significant sentimental value but which aren't fabulously valuable and that's not so bad either.
But there is no gain to society for a select few to become particularly wealthy in an undeserving manner, such as by inheritance. In fact, it's dangerous, because wealth tends to provide power, and now you've got people who have no rightful claim to great wealth also possessing great power and likely using it for ill. Certainly that's the usual way things go, and we should adopt rules for the usual case, and not for rare exceptions.
And it's not odd to see wealthy people perfectly in favor of estate taxes. Here's something from Andrew Carnegie's book:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. ... Of all forms of taxation this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community from which it chiefly came, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the State, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the State marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.
As for progressive income taxes, ability to pay is the best way to go. It works. People are okay with it.
An absolute flat tax is pointless unless the amount you need to raise is very very low: taxing everyone, say, $100/year will result in some people easily being able to afford it, others barely able to afford it, and quite a few simply unable to afford it. Saying that it's fair that each person should pay the same quantity doesn't help them get it in order to pay it. You will wind up with a lot of people not paying their taxes, requiring either piling unjust punishment on top of their existing poverty, probably at the expense of the state, thus requiring even more taxes to proceed, or a de facto progressive taxation system in which people who are unable to pay are allowed to slide.
A proportional flat tax similarly fails. Below a certain amount of income, people simply cannot afford to pay, even if the tax were merely 1%. Unable to get blood from a stone, you must again either punish poor people for being poor, which is the sort of thing that justifies having your head cut off by an angry mob with a guillotine, or you wind up adopting a progressive taxation scheme and merely being a hypocrite who is saddled with a stupid tax system.
Some flat tax proposals suggest including various measures to avoid this, e.g. only kicking in above a certain level of income. This means that they're not actually flat taxes, they're progressive taxes which have two brackets, and are thus simply poorly designed. An ideal progressive tax, OTOH, would probably just be a mathematical function, with the tax rates varying smoothly as income varied, but for the sake of simplicity, we tend to have a number of brackets.
As a closing word of advice, you may do well to google things quickly on your own, rather than demanding answers to cover for your own ignorance or as a crappy rhetorical device.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yeah, but look at one of those jobs, for example. Let's say that person is working 8 hours per day. They pay a certain amount of tax. Now compare that to cases where their hours are cut to 4 hours per day, or expanded to 12 hours per day. Even without progressive tax tables (imagine a flat tax rate), notice how the taxes go up or down. Then imagine the real world, where there are progressive tax rates. Notice how the taxes go up or down even more extremely, as person works harder or less hard.
Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax. I think you're just pointing out that there are other factors too, such as jobs' pay rates per hour (where I make more sitting on my ass as a desk, than some guy pouring hot asphalt in the summer). Take nearly any job, no matter how hard or easy) and double or half the amount of work, and you'll see a strong correlation with how much tax we take away from that person.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
For example, let's say there's normally 3 taxing locales for sake of argument.
Part of the problem is that there aren't. There are something like 13,000 different taxing districts in the U.S., each with their own tax rate and regulations.
Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax.
Not really. If that were the case, then the tax would differ between two jobs of differing hardness but equal pay. But it doesn't. Likewise, if we double or halve the amount of work done at a job, and thus the hardness of the job, but don't change the amount of pay, the taxes remain constant while the hardness varies.
What you're really identifying is that if someone's work hours are doubled or halved, this typically comes hand in hand with a doubling or halving of their pay, which is the actual factor that affects their taxes.
The IRS doesn't care if you pour asphalt or sit at your desk.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.